c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...
— Archibald MacLeish
Librarians were like guardian angels, with graying hair and beady eyes, magnified through reading glasses, and always read to recommend new literary windows to gaze through.
— Ellen Hopkins, Burned
...There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.
— Lemony Snicket, The Carnivorous Carnival
...when I look at and study the ranks of my books - for I have put the name of each author on the binding - I feel as if I am looking at the holy graves of those who wrote them.
— Pietro Candido Decembrio
A library, no matter how big or small, is a careful balance of love and responsibility. A machine, if you will, cranked by those who care most about reading.
— Kimberly Karalius, Love Fortunes and Other Disasters
I want to know how the hell you managed to locate that hideout using the damn public library.
— Richard Castle
I exercised my mental muscles in the library, and lo and behold, I transformed myself from a casual reader into a focused one. So it was more than just free books, but also free space and a culture that reinforced settling down, deep reading, thinking, imagining, and exploring with my mind. I am no doubt a writer today because I had a place to go as a kid, where I knew stories were essential, and where everybody also reveled in the wonder within books.
— Sergio Troncoso, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays
Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder—from before my shelves of books!...
— Anatole France
The library was the best place in the world.
— Anita Anand
For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don't read, the loss of a library is a tragedy hat might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading-or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life.
— Michael Moore
In the Library you took your good times where you could find them.
— Scott  Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char
I never got int the library thing. I always liked that I could put my hand on a book when I wanted it. And to know I owned them
—  that was important too.
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
— Jo Godwin
I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.
— Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites
He wanted to say: how could you be so nice and yet so dumb? The best thing you could do with the peasents was to leave them alone. Let them get on with it. When people who can read and write start fighting for those who can't, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
— Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
A man's library opens up his character to the world.
— Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer
The student has his Rome, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion
The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.
— Melvil Dewey
In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely.
— José Latour
The library is not just an information center. It's always been a refuge for anyone to come to, whatever status in society. For people, intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, for lonely people. For every walk of life.
— Wendy MacNaughton
It was a well-aimed arrow. Had anyone even noticed she was no longer at the library? All the people she'd worked with, worked for? All the patrons she'd helped? Had she been so replaceable that her absence hadn't caused a single ripple?Hadn't she mattered at all?
— Nora Roberts
He pointed the scepter around the library and had an instant input of all of the books that were there into his brain, as if he had read them all at once.
— Kaza Kingsley, The Secret of Ashona
An old librarian once said to me, " whatever we deal with, coming here is always a visual reward.
— Josh Hanagarne, The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family
Once upon a time in a basement library nook,I stumbled upon my first favorite book.Pulled into adventure as the pages unfurled,I found treasures greater than gold or pearls.
— Tyrean Martinson, Light Reflections
We find the library world, like the real world, impossible to understand on a rational basis. We turn then to the outer reaches of our mind and treat librarianship with the irrationality that it deserves. While we most often turn to humour merely to enjoy ourselves, we do sometimes do so to make a point. That point is simply that the world of librarianship is ridiculous and that we should all take a far less serious view of our work. What we accomplish as librarians is not, after all, likely to change the world."~ Norman D. Stevens
— Peter Gellatly, Archives of Library Research from the Molesworth Institute
A library is thought in cold storage.
— Lord Samuel
You cannot have a really terrific library without at least one terrific librarian, the way you cannot have a really terrific bedroom unless you can lock the door.
— Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?
I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.
— Alain Resnais
Everybody comes to the library naked. That's why they come here - to dress themselves in books.
— Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Perhaps, Katrine, in a library just like this one, you will find that all the things you thought were impossible and all the things that everyone, throughout history, have thought were impossible are not really impossible at all... they never were impossible.
— Alexei Maxim Russell, Forgotten Lore: Volume I
History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man’s library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.
— Andrew  Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office.
— Umberto Eco
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
— Michael Moorcock, The Whispering Swarm
Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron or a printing press.
— John C. Wright
Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.
— Anonymous
Every library is a palace
—  every book is a king
Fourteen is the age when time first starts to make its presence felt. Time took on such a variety of hues in those days that even my frozen mind sometimes reflected the colours of the world around me, and I could feel my thoughts fluttering in the humid, salty breeze. At such moments, when the brilliant blue skies, the flaming carpets beneath the Gulmohur trees in the school grounds and the nut-brown twinkle in Sonia’s eyes splashed into the moments of my life, I felt alive. Only time had no colour in the library. In the library, time simply ceased to be.
— Indu Muralidharan, The Reengineers
The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land
We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin
— Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.
— Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present — and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser — but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all.
— Jack Iams, Table For Four
In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
I will tell everyone I know to come [to the library]. This place saves lives.
— Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
Books had been her means of escape
—  now they would be her refuge.
I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said, 'Mommy, I think we hurt the book!
— Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.
— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know
A library's function is to give the public in the quickest and cheapest way: information, inspiration, and recreation. If a better way than the book can be found, we should use it.
— Melvil Dewey
The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.
— Padma Venkatraman, Climbing the Stairs
I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.'Librarian: 'Okay.''--'Librarian: '--''--'Librarian: 'Enjoy your day!
— Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges, “Poems of the Gifts
— Tatyana Eckstrand
Do you ever hide books you've read over and over again because you're so sick of them?''Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they saw one of the books at the library, so now they think the librarians are book fairies.
— Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery.
— S.D. Chrostowska, Permission
Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. – David Sawyer, Spokesman-Review, 18 December 2000
— Tatyana Eckstrand
Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I’ve stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes. – Michael Perry, Handbook for Freelance Writing
— Tatyana Eckstrand
There is a canyon within a reasonable distance of nearly every school in the city," [Elaine Brooks] pointed out. What an exciting prospect, she said - a network of natural libraries for teaching children about the region’s rare and fragile ecosystems - and about themselves.
— Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
The library at home when she was child had been her refuge. She gravitated to it. When she was anxious, just taking a book of a shelf calmed her. Opening the cover, feeling the paper’s smoothness, smelling the sheets, the leather, even sometimes the ink, centered her.
— M.J. Rose, Seduction
Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.
— Marilynne Robinson
The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.
— Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade
Let's go downtown," Dad said. "By the public library. You never know what wild and crazy things might be happening at the library.
— Marion Jensen, Almost Super
Note found in the patron suggestion box:"You have SIGNS up near the computers that say BE QUIET, but people don't be quiet. They laugh out loud and talk out loud. Libraries used to be quiet, but they aren't anymore because you let all the assholes in!!!!!
— Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
— David Mitchell
INTERVIEWERYou’re self-educated, aren’t you?BRADBURYYes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
— Ray Bradbury
I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.
— Helen Oyeyemi
Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.
— Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
— Norman Cousins
every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.
— Neal Stephenson, The Confusion
He liked bookstores, and libraries too. They had a sacred, peaceful hush, like graveyards without the shadow of death.
— Garrett Leigh, Only Love
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Sunday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books...books..books.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.
— Sara Sheridan
You have that look on your face,” she whispered mockingly, “that Beast-just-gave-Beauty-a-whole-frickin’-library look and now she’s going to spin around like she can read them all at once through osmosis.
— Victoria Kahler, Luisa Across the Bay
I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France, that I felt like collecting plants in a new world... The number of these leaves, the way they separated easily, and the great variety of plants whose imprints I saw, appeared to me just as many volumes of botany representing in the same quarry the oldest library of the world.
— Antoine de Jussieu
I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee?The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops!Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?
— Yone Noguchi, The Story Of Yone Noguchi: Told By Himself; Illustrated By Yoshio Markino [ 1914 ]
Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground.
— Ilona Andrews, Gunmetal Magic
Planting a flower's like opening a book, because either way you're starting something. And your garden's your library.
— Nora Roberts, Blue Dahlia
I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.
— Sara Sheridan
During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.
— Sydney Brenner
Defending the library service from the predations of ideologically-motivated public schoolboys who had immensely privileged childhoods isn’t ‘whining,’ it is the pursuit of passionately held beliefs.
— Alan Gibson
The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.
— Charles Finch, The September Society
The library is a symbol of freedom.
— Sara Sheridan
Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark
— M.R. James, A Warning to the Curious Ghost Stories
I was so getting tired of fighting for my life in the library.
— Jennifer Estep, Dark Frost
All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)
— Larry Brown
If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.
— E.L. Doctorow
Anyone who thinks this world is without magic, hasn't been to a library.
— Amy Fellner Dominy, Audition & Subtraction
... my heart skips a beat. Seriously, like a CD from the public library, it goes ZZebbTTT and skips.
— Brent Crawford, Carter Finally Gets It
Standing before the worn books and dusty shelves, she seemed like a ray of light in the windowless room.
— Lisa Kleypas, Because You're Mine
The library serves as a gathering place for friends whoshare the love of books. It further serves as a resource for those who escape the pressure of everydaylife, doing it by losing themselves in the written word.
— Kristen Ashley, Breathe
A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper.
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notice tell you the names of more than two score of books at the outside. Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.
— George MacDonald, The Fisherman's Lady
There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell you, those who do not, and there are some, are in the wrong profession.
— Mary Virginia Provines, Bright Heritage
Someone has said of books that they are our 'amplest heritages' of thought, and so they are. That doesn't necessarily mean that they must be learned or profound. They are food for the mind and different minds require different foods ; everyone is better for variety. Whatever stimulates the mind feeds it, be it fact, fiction or fable. That is where our responsibility lies ; in knowing what builds good mental blood and brawn, and in dispensing that only. Don't ever let yourself think you haven't time to read.
— Mary Virginia Provines, Bright Heritage
Yet there in the library, Hamish and I climbed the bright ladder of the body, as if it were sky and we a deafening. twisting flock of birds that could never fall to earth.
— Regina O'Melveny, The Book of Madness and Cures
Besides, Fi was convinced that instinct could determine a body's literary needs, just as physical cravings pointed to dietary shortfalls. She'd experienced it herself more than once among the library's dense shelves; not knowing what she should read next, she'd wandered, sniffing slightly, palms open. When intuition hit, she felt a sensation she couldn't describe exactly: her hands seemed to know where to go. And when she reached, invariably she found exactly the book she needed at that moment - sometimes fiction, sometimes biography, sometimes a slim volume of obscure poetry
— Masha Hamilton
Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
— Alberto Manguel
A big island of library, in the middle of an ocean, away from all the fools of the world, would this place not be a real paradise?
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It was an epoch of her life, an hour never to be forgotten, this first coming into relation with a really noble library.
— Charlotte M. Vaile, The Orcutt Girls
Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, "The world is quiet here," as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.
— Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope
Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.
— L.R. Knost
Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.
— Joanne Harris
Oh, wow.""What do you think?""I tried to imagine, but--I mean...it's so much more--""Think it's large enough to keep you satisfied for a while?""It's so much bigger than I expected"He backed away, leaving Beatrice to gaze in wonder at the library that took up half of the second floor."I think I'll just leave you two alone for a bit," he said with a chuckle.
— Elizabeth   Hunter, A Hidden Fire
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
— Richard Francis Burton
I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.
— Mark Jason Dominus
She'd absolutely adored the library-an entire building where anyone could take things they didn't own and feel no remorse about it.
— Ally Carter, Heist Society
If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.
— Mark Pryor, The Bookseller
Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it.
— Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
Sam hauled open the library door."There you are!" Whit pushed up from the desk he'd been hunched over. "We thought you two had given up on us.""Unlike some people I know," I said, removing my mittens and scarf, "we don't live here.""She says that now." Sam followed me toward Whit's and Orrin's desks, where they worked over flat electronic screens. "But the first thing she said when I showed her the library was that we should move in."Orrin lifted an eyebrow, oddly delicate for someone so large. "The acoustics would be terrible.
— Jodi Meadows, Incarnate
PAPER TOWERSThe library was on the second floor of the House, not far from my room. It had two floors—the first held the majority of the books and a balcony wrapped in a wrought-iron railing held another set. It was a cavalcade of tomes, all in immaculate rows, and with study carrels and tables thrown in for good measure. It was my home away from home(away from home.I walked inside and paused for a moment to breathe in the scent of paper and dust—the perfumes of knowledge. The library was empty of patrons as far as I could tell, but I could hear the rhythmic squeal of a library cart somewhere in the rows. I followed them down until I found the dark-haired vampire shelving books with mechanical precision. I knew him only as “the librarian.” He was a fount of information, and he had a penchant for leaving books outside my door.
— Chloe Neill, Drink Deep
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
— Zadie Smith
Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.
— Justin Cronin, The Passage
Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn’t see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way.""How I got over
— Darryl Pinckney
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.
— Thomas Jefferson
John Armato, a Public relations executive, cherishes his growing Library of Candidates. When people ask him if he's actually read all those books, he asks them if they've actually eaten all the food in their kitchen. "It is good to put up a supply of books; it increases the odds that you'll have what you want when you're hungry for it," he says
— Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life
I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.
— Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887
And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?
— Walter Benjamin
She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.
— T.E.D. Klein, The Ceremonies
A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.
— Henry Ward Beecher
Somhow those Ten Men -- at the time they were called Recruiters, of course -- discovered that Constance had been at the library. Most likely one of their informants saw her come out, because it was on that very day that the brutes showed up and threatened the librarians. Who told them nothing, incidentally.''The same thing happened in Holland,' Kate reflected. 'You'd think these guys would learn their lesson -- librarians know how to keep quiet.''It helps to ask politely,' said Mr. Benedict
— Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma
For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.
— Lavie Tidhar, The Bookman
It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-‘Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more than 100,000 volumes collection arranged in classified order.
— Balqis Suja', Islamic Librarianship and Malaysian Islamic Libraries
How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.""Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.""I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
She...can talk brillantly upon any subject provided she knows nothing about it.
— Oscar Wilde
I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
— Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong
—  we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest: And Other Plays
Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.
— James McNeill Whistler
A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
— Oscar Wilde
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
— Oscar Wilde
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…
— Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the future
—  the far-seeing are also the foolish.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors.
— Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement In England
She lives in the poetry she cannot write.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination
— Oscar Wilde, Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
Life cannot be written
—  life can only be lived.
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.
— Oscar Wilde
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
— Oscar Wilde
There's this funny thing I've noticed about people. You never really get the story you expect. Ask them about what they have, and they'll tell you about what they want. Ask them to tell you about love, and they'll tell you about heartbreak. Ask them about death, though, and they'll tell you about life.
— Pascalle Lepas
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.
— Oscar Wilde
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
— Oscar Wilde
I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.
— Charles Hamilton Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, with a Chapter of Biography
Du Bois sighed theatrically. “It’s as if Oscar Wilde never died for our sins.
— Gavin G. Smith, The Age of Scorpio
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those were my last words. To be listed in some book of quotations, alphabetically after 
— Roberta Pearce, Famous Penultimate Words
I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
— Oscar Wilde
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
— Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,
— Oscar Wilde
this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband