What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.
Aaron Swartz
The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.
When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I'm afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.
Our house has a library - it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! - and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There's nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.
Adam Christopher
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.
Adam Gopnik
I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library. I was around nine years old when I began choosing my own books in earnest.
Adriana Trigiani
The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.
I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library.
The cultural center of Asia Minor, Pergamon boasted a vast library of 200,000 scrolls, a spectacular 10,000-seat theater, and a monumental Great Altar decorated with sculptures of the Olympian gods defeating the Giants. People came from all around the Mediterranean seeking cures at the famous Temple of Asclepius, god of medicine.
Adrienne Mayor
The Woodruff Library Archives has done a phenomenal job archiving my son's materials.
Afeni Shakur
That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.
Al Jarreau
There are probably a few library fines I haven't paid yet, but I'm a pretty clean-cut guy overall.
Al Yankovic
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
Alan Bennett
If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.
Alan Dundes
My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.
Alan Garner
I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.
Alberto Manguel
I've always loved to paint - I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model - and I've being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.
Alek Wek
I try to give the music more of a campfire feel as opposed to a library atmosphere. I like when you can hear people hanging out in the songs and doing a little shuffling. It creates a feeling of participation.
Alex Ebert
I was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster, I would look through these books in the library and dream about visiting Loch Ness one day… That stuff was really kind of what I loved as a kid.
Alex Hirsch
When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.
Alexander Kluge
I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
My dad was a very unconventional Asian American man. He was very much not quiet, not shy, not passive. If he had to fart, he'd do it in the library. He did not care. He was like, 'I don't know these people. I'm uncomfortable, and I need to let it go.'
The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.
I was an engineering student and spent a lot of time in the library, and no one applauds when you finish your calculations.
I'd go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she'd turn my head into a snow globe.
In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom.
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.
I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.
Just be a cool grandpa who's creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.
Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.
As a journalist I'm comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.
I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings.
I always said it was my ambition to have a library - I have one - and my dream was to have a pool. Then 'Strictly' came along.
My YouTube channel is kind of a library of all my issues I've lived with. To process it emotionally, it's been good and bad.
There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.
When I first moved to L.A., I didn't have a lot of money to join a gym or take classes, so I improvised. My sister and I went to the library and looked over their DVD collection and discovered Neena and Veena, these Egyptian twins who have a whole series of belly dancing routines. We did them all.
My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.
We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
Fridays after school, especially when the weather was lousy, Mom would take me to the library. She'd let me check out whatever I wanted, and I checked out a lot.
I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.
In my library/study/barn, there is a Ping-Pong table on which I can pile working books and spread maps.
That perfect tranquillity of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.
