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Love among the Stacks

ON LIBRARIES

BY VARIOUS AUTHORS

THE LIBRARY still stands as that most trusted institution: a keystone of communities and a place for individual readers to go deep and get lost. As text grapples with the challenges and opportunities of the digital age, here are some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers on the pleasure—and necessity—of books.

HAVING FUN isn’t hard
when you’ve got a library card.
—Marc Brown, from a song on the Arthur show

WHEN I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.
—Jean Fritz

LET US READ, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
—Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique

OH, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

WHEN I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard.
—Marilynne Robinson, “When I Was a Child”

I WAS made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

IF YOU want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
—Frank Zappa

A UNIVERSITY is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university.
—Shelby Foote, North Carolina Libraries

MY ALMA MATER was books, a good library. . . . I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
—Malcolm X

THE LIBRARY was a place I went to find out what there was to know.
—Zadie Smith, BBC interview

WHEN I graduated from high school I went down to the local library and I spent ten years there, two or three days a week, and I got a better education than most people get from universities. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight years old.
—Ray Bradbury, interview with Brendan Dowling for Public Libraries

NO ONE can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy. . . . There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour’s undisturbed reading in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory.
—George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys”

IT WASN’T until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
—John Waters, quoted in The Tenacity of the Cockroach by Stephen Thompson

A BOOK must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka, from a letter to Oskar Pollack

IT MUST have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.
—Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

IF YOU want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, “Do I really have anything to add?” If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
—Margaret Atwood, Second Words

THAT LIBRARY was a Pandorica of fabulous, interwoven randomness, as rich as plum cake. Push a seed of curiosity in between any two books and it would grow, overnight, into a rainforest hot with monkeys and jaguars and blowpipes and clouds. The room was full, and my head was full. What a magical system to place around a penniless girl.
—Caitlin Moran, “What Have They Done to My Library?” (The Times, April 18, 2015)

A GREAT BOOK should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
—William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

BEN wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you’d be able to find whatever you were looking for.
—Brian Selznick, Wonderstruck

AS IN the card catalogue system, there is room for indefinite expansion without devices or provisions.
—Melvil Dewey, “Dewey Decimal Classification”

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

WALKING the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines—it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
—Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

THE LIBRARY is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
—Isabel Allende

A DESERTED LIBRARY in the morning—there’s something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.
—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

THE GREYBEARD, at his soul’s behest
Exploring life’s unanswered jest;
The stripling knight astride a dream,
His eyes alight, his spurs agleam—
The library! There’s nothing there
Not found upon my thoroughfare.
Which quite excuses, you see,
My imperturbability.
—E. B. White, “A Library Lion Speaks”

Mary J Black says  "We need libraries."