I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don’t belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs. – Brian Selznick
The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate. – Arthur Quiller-Couch
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000. – Anthony Burgess
I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You’ll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn’t fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library. – Alberto Manguel
I’d go to the library so I could sit in a big, quiet room and listen to pages being turned. There was a boring librarian who everyone in fifth grade hated. But I loved her because when she would read us stories in her soft voice, she’d turn my head into a snow globe. – Andrea Seigel
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is like the greatest, most fantastic library you could ever imagine. It’s a labyrinth of books with tunnels, bridges, arches, secret sections – and it’s hidden inside an old palace in the old city of Barcelona. – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight. – Amy Bloom
When I first moved to L.A., I didn’t have a lot of money to join a gym or take classes, so I improvised. My sister and I went to the library and looked over their DVD collection and discovered Neena and Veena, these Egyptian twins who have a whole series of belly dancing routines. We did them all. – AnnaLynne McCord
I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library – I’m a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction – so I’ll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I’ll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast. – Anthony Geary
My YouTube channel is kind of a library of all my issues I’ve lived with. To process it emotionally, it’s been good and bad. – Anna Akana
In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch. – Adam Gopnik
What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists. – Archibald MacLeish
That’s Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I’d never worked with before. – Al Jarreau
I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was ‘Detroit Rock City.’ I heard it in the school library, where I lived. – Brian Posehn
When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job. – Aaron Swartz
When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible. – Alexander Kluge
For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books. – Avi
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book – a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy. – Aaron Swartz
My stepfather introduced me to The London Library when I was about 18; the clientele has definitely changed since then, but it is still a wonderful oasis in the middle of London. – Natascha McElhone
If the library’s rarest frequenters are the ones we’d like to see in them the most, then libraries are failing. – David Harsanyi
Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie. – Nate Silver
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library. – F. Scott Fitzgerald