I just love reading quotes about books and libraries.  Do you have a favorite quote that should be added?  Email me your quote and your name!

  The medicine chest of the soul.  Inscription over the door of the Library at Thebes. (1)

  A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books.  Anonymous (1)

  Thou can'st not die. Here thou art more than safe where every book is thy epitaph.  On Sir Thomas Bodley's library Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) (1)

  Library
Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.

- Light Armour. McGraw-Hill, 1954. (1)

  The student has his Rome, his Florence, 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 (1807-1882) (1)

  "Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off." - The Callahan Touch  Spider Robinson (1)

  "He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library"  Tempest Tost   Robertson Davies (2)

  "Perhaps the two most valuable and satisfactory products of American civilization are the librarian on the one hand and the cocktail in the other."  Louis Stanley Jast (2)

  "I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones."  Edward Gorey  (Boston Globe article, 1998, as quoted in Salon) (2)

The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching for infinity.  Diane G. Kadanoff (2)

  "Everything is held together with stories.  That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion."  Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets & Writers Mar/Apr. 1994 (2)

  "Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is"  Garrison Keillor, Lives of the Cowboys (2)

  Willow: Gee, maybe we should help Giles. He might be in danger.
Xander: Nah, he's like Super Librarian. People forget, Willow, that knowledge is the ultimate weapon. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2)

  "To look around at a roomful of readers, each bent over a book was to realize that this posture is among the most beautiful of  human transfigurations."  Editorial, New York Times, 11/16/98 (2)

  Words lead to deeds...they prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness. Saint Teresa (2)

 "...there are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.  And part of the finding is the getting lost.  If you're lost, you really start to look around and to listen." [Metzger/Parabola 4:4 (1979)] (2)
 

Credits:  The following people must be credited for finding these wonderful quotes!
(1) Brigid Heckman
(2) GraceAnne DeCandido

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