#libra

My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library. ↗

— Peter Golkin

#bicycles #bike #bikes #conservation #favorite

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves. ↗

— Marilyn Johnson

#men

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. ↗

— Zoë Heller

#loneliness #writers #librarians

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness. ↗

— Richard Fortey

#nature

A teenager deserves a library that recognizes reality. He needs an information source and study area that does not impose arbitrary, crippling rules on him. His library should recognize that dignity and silence are not prior requisites to learning […] He would like, needs, and deserves for other people to stop trying to protect him and allow him the right to choose information for himself […] Most of all the teenager needs people in libraries to recognize and accept him as a respectable human being. ↗

— Anne Osborn

#respect

[Librarians] are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. ↗

— Michael Moore

#librarians #revolution

I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#library

My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#age

I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#basketball court #being #comfortable #court #i

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library. ↗

— Tony Benn

#fifty #file #library #public #public library