Library Media Quotes
- Submitted
by Steve Bahr, Roseburg, Oregon
A book never interrupts with a commercial.
Don't swallow everything you read, but read everything you swallow.
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.
A good book is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write
things worth reading, or do things worth writing.
Just say know to books.
Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you
through times of no libraries.
Reading is like breathing--Bad breath is better than no breath at all.
Why go buy a book when you can go by a library?
A pickle makes a squishy bookmark.
Never judge a book by its movie.
A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
A book--like the Internet, but in convenient paper form.
A book never interrupts with a
commercial.
Borrow and return--Recycle reading.
Open your mind--Open a book.
Your future is an open book.
Leave your eyeprints all over our books.
- Borrowed
from California School Library Listserv, February 2003, Joanne Ladewig,
Library Aide, Lawrence Elementary,
G.G.U.S.D., Garden Grove, California.
Here's a long list of very quotable quotes (compiled from several
websites
and archived LM_NET listserv posts)about libraries and reading. Use them
to
make posters and bookmarks, use them in speeches and on any program,
business card, bulletin, bulletin board, announcement, email, newsletter,
letter to the editor, or other correspondence. Get thoughts about
reading
and LIBRARIES into every situation you can! This first quote is perfect
for
board meetings and speeches:
"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to
that of
an ignorant nation."
Walter Cronkite
"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into
the
soul and a door onto the world."
Rita Dove
"Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up
windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and
contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for
the
better."
Sidney Sheldon
"The part of my education that has had the deepest influence wasn't
any
particular essay or even a specific class; it was how I was able to
apply
everything I learned in the library to certain situations in my
life."
Gloria Estefan
"As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the
world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in
Philadelphia."
Ed Bradley (60 Minutes correspondent)
"Life is short. Learn fast."
"You are the window through which you must see the world."
-Laura Ingalls
Wilder
"I live for books." Thomas Jefferson
Finding information is easy; finding knowledge is more
difficult."
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by
others.
--Andre Maurois
Books invite all; they constrain none.
--Inscription at the Los Angeles Public Library
Thomas Jefferson: "I cannot live without books."
Books are the holes in the fences of life. Peg Kehret
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of your own.
The child that reads is one who succeeds.
A book is just a way to remember a story, like a photograph is a way to
remember a friend. Anne Lindbergh
I READ: because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I
can be
anybody.
Richard Peck
I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they
bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others
through their eyes and their ears.
Helen Keller
Any book you haven't read is a new book.
Anything can happen when you open a book.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison
A book is a friend. American proverb
It's not having knowledge, but knowing where to get it.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's
too
dark to read. Groucho Marx
As I walked through the v ast corridors of knowledge, I realized that life
is like the library and the books can be read only one at a time, and each
one will reveal something new.
Temple Grandin
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he
reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is well to read everything of something, and something of
everything.
Henry Peter
Brougham
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler
Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly
into
the future. Jim Bishop
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's look on Treasure
Island. Walt Disney
Never judge a book by its movie. J. W. Eagan
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most
accessible and wisest counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot
Read, read, read. William Faulkner
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. W. Fusselman
Read books. They are good for us.
Natalie Goldberg
The newest books are those that never grown old.
George Holbrook Jackson
What a school thinks about its library is a measure
of what it feels about education.
~ Harold Howe
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky.
My pile of books
Are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard
By the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel ~
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you,
but the one which makes you think.
~ Mccosh
The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss ~
"Any book you haven't read is a new book."
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be
called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
Willa Cather: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go
on
repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened
before."
(from O Pioneers!pt. II, Ch. 4)
"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but
they
are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern
box."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The library is a place where you can better your life. And the
librarian?
Like an angel, wings pressed like white ferns under her sweater. A being
close to God."
(Johnston, Tony. Any Small Goodness - a Novel of the
Barrio.
New York: The Blue Sky Press, 2001)
Madam, a circulating library in a town is an evergreen
tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the
year! And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are
so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit
at last. (from
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals)
"We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts:
we
need books, time, and silence." ~Philip Pullman
"They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the
magical
books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most
dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a
library."
---Terry
Pratchet "Guards!Guards!"
"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
"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
"I thought I'd be a librarian until I met some crazy ones."
Edward Gorey
(Boston Globe article, 1998, as quoted in Salon)
"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
(first encountered as the epigraph to Charles de Lint's lovely novel
about stories, Someplace to be Flying)
"I'd best head to the library. Research beckons" -- Rupert
Giles
"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
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
"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
"The answers are there; you just have to know where to look."
Dana Scully
"Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up
its
empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors."
Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
Mortimer J. Adler (b.1902)
"He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his
contemplation
was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had
read as
much as other men he should have known no more than other men."
John Aubrey (1626-1697)
"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something
beautiful,
ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of
poetry."
Gaston Bachelard
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some
few are to
be chewed and digested."
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
"He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a
wholesome
counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by
reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain
himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes."
Barrow
"The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of
fourth-rate readers."
Stan Barstow
"The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is
copied
out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied
with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his
inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior
jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement
of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits
it to command."
Walter Benjamin
"All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality --
the
story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all
times, how to escape."
Arthur Christopher Benson
"Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made
disagreeable."
Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)
"A conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in
what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of
innovative
creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators."
Malcolm Bradbury (b.1932)
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people
to stop
reading them."
Ray Bradbury (b.1920)
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not
reading
them."
Joseph Brodsky
"It is well to read everything of something, and something of
everything."
Lord Henry P. Brougham (1778-1868)
"To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting."
Edmund Burke
"Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new
approaches to the written word. First, it requires a new approach to
orchestrating information, by skillfully choosing what to read and what to
ignore. Second, it requires a new approach to integrating information, by
reading faster and with greater comprehension."
Jimmy Calano
"The mere brute pleasure of reading --the sort of pleasure a cow must
have in grazing."
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"A truly great book should be read in youth, once again in maturity
and
once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light,
at noon and by moonlight."
Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
"The reader cannot create; that has been done for him by the author.
The reader can only interpret, giving the author a fair chance to make his
impression."
Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
"There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book
-- any sort of book -- is wondrous;
they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use
otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead."
Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
"The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old
age."
Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848)
"There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an
art of
writing."
Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848)
"Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman
'other' or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer
a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just
as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but
contaminating antithesis, a reader."
Terry Eagleton
"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for
literature."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of
Europe,
were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn
them
all."
Francois FéNelon
"Read in order to live."
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
W. Fusselman
"When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be
reading
numbers, any more than you read words when reading
books. You will be
reading meanings."
Harold S. Geneen (1910-1997)
"The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as
if I gained
a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it
resembles the meeting of an old one."
Sir James Goldsmith (1933-1997)
"The art of reading is to skip judiciously".
Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894)
"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it
consoles, it
distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience
of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."
Elizabeth Hardwick (b.1916)
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is
wholesome and
bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch."
Augustus Hare (1792-1834)
"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is,
there
reading makes it more."
John Harington (1561-1612)
"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is,
there reading makes it more."
John Harington (1561-1612)
"In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have
lived more
than people who cannot or will not read."
S. I. Hayakawa
"One should not read to swallow all, but rather see what one has use
for."
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
"Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or
life."
Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)
"The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of
time and
place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at
any hour
of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your
time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness."
Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948)
"What is read with delight is commonly retained, because
pleasure always
secures attention; but the books which are consulted by occasional
necessity, and perused with impatience, seldom leave any traces on the
mind... Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your
hand
are the most useful, after all... such books form the mass of general and
easy reading."
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"I am a part of everything that I have read."
John Kieran
"... I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to
lose myself
in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot
sit
and think. Books think for me".
Charles Lamb (1775-18
"For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may
be
lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of
lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time."
Louis L'amour (1908-1988)
"What is reading, but silent conversation."
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
"After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor
a
show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little
theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs,
commiserates, condones and smiles.
That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and
superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my
books
are not and never will be.
Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he
doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read
someone else."
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not
love
breathing."
Harper Lee (b.1926)
"In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read
the
oldest. The classics are always modern."
Lord Edward Lytton (1803-1873)
"The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who
shares the same books."
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
"Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow
register
without consciousness."
Anthony Marcel
"Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare."
Harriet Martineau
"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a
refuge from
almost all of the miseries of life."
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one
which
makes you think."
James McCosh
"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make
reading
one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."
Richard McKenna
"We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate."
Henry Miller (1891-1980)
"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so
lasting."
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
"No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with
pleasure."
Noah Porter (1811-1892)
"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good
dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was
that
after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once
hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion."
Jean Rhys (1894-1979)
"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but
more
important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
Hazel Rochman
"I cannot think of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed,
without
warning or discomfort, on the last page of the new book that we most
wanted
to read."
John Russell (b.1919)
"I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't
assuage."
Charles de Secondat
"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the
lambs he's
digested, and I've been reading all my life."
Giorgos Seferis
"How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him
everything
else first?"
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of
reading."
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)
"It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different
dinners
and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which
have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body,
and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind."
Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writing so
that you
shall come easily by what others have labored hard for."
Socrates (469-399 BC)
"Reading is seeing by proxy."
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
Richard Steele
"Reading -- the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at
bay."
William Styron (b.1925)
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them
at
all."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for
reading,
or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
Atwood H. Townsend
"That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great
blessing.
Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been
able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never
possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--
but
still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am
inclined
to think that it is so with most readers".
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)
"The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting that
pace the
author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book
can be
understood if it is taken at the wrong speed."
Mark Van Doren (1894-1973)
"Choose an author as you choose a friend."
Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723)
The end of reading is not more books but more life."
Holbrook Jackson
"Readings is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
Joseph Addison
"When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy
food and
clothes." Desiderius Erasmus 1466-1536
"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a
long day makes the day happier." Kathleen Norris
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who
can't read them.
Mark Twain
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Charles De Secondat
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely
alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a
book.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Reading, 1854
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for
your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by
the latter.
Paxton Hood
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by
concealing evidence that they never existed. Don't be afraid to go in your
library and read every book...
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be
chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts,
others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and
with diligence and attention.
Francis Bacon
Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact
man.
Francis Bacon
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single
sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt
atthe
end of the year.
Horace Mann
Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.
Will Rogers
If you can read this, thank a teacher.
Anonymous teacher
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Lady M. W. Montague
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a
new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it
resembles
the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Henry Peter Brougham
If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe,
were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn
them
all.
Francois Fenelon
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a
genuine and passionate love of reading.
Rufus Choate
In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more
than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have
only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives
and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S. I. Hayakawa
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he
reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Learning to Read is Basic,
Loving to Read is the Plus"
"Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of
writers."
Steven Spielberg (b.1947)