#libra

For him that stealeth,or borroweth and returneth not,this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his last punishment, let the flames of hell consume him for ever. Curse on book thieves, from the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#library #malediction #change

...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#librarians #life

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community. ↗

— R. David Lankes

#community #librarians #libraries #change

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#library #literature #reading #words #death

Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses ↗

— J. Patrick Lewis

#death #library #reading #death

Choosing a new book was like looking for treasure. ↗

— Kit Pearson

#libraries #dreams

We cannot have good libraries until we first have good librarians-properly educated, profesionally recognized and fairly rewarded. ↗

— Herbert S. White

#library-journal #education

The Poet at the Breakfast Table: My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#series #experience

A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the dawn. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#faith

In the wide pile, by others heeded not, Hers was one sacred solitary spot, Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves contain For moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain. ↗

— Walter Scott

#library #solitude #food