{"quotes":[{"text":"Every girl who aspires ultimately to outfit her own home should assemble a library on architectural styles and on furniture both traditional and modern. As few brides can buy expensively illustrated volumes and household equipment simultaneously, a girl should begin asking parents for books early in life, probably while still in the primary grades...","author":"Johnson O'Connor","tags":["brides","library"],"id":1212,"author_id":"Johnson+O%27Connor"},{"text":"Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.","author":"Heather Brewer","tags":["library"],"id":1909,"author_id":"Heather+Brewer"},{"text":"When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book... Was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... It speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a 'report' upon the 'mystery of things.'But if this is what a book is... Then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that... All these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city... Decays. The nation loses its grandeur... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...","author":"Archibald MacLeish","tags":["books","libraries","library"],"id":2454,"author_id":"Archibald+MacLeish"},{"text":"The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.","author":"Rachel Cohen","tags":["autodidacts","library"],"id":2482,"author_id":"Rachel+Cohen"},{"text":"He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, 'All heroines are charming to us.","author":"James Stephens","tags":["books","library"],"id":2655,"author_id":"James+Stephens"},{"text":"His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.","author":"Ray Bradbury","tags":["books","library","words"],"id":4718,"author_id":"Ray+Bradbury"},{"text":"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.","author":"Harold Howe","tags":["education","libraries","library","school"],"id":5172,"author_id":"Harold+Howe"},{"text":"Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are unprepared to obtain new information for development. Learning is a way of staying alive.","author":"Israelmore Ayivor","tags":["alive","areas","books","dead","death","development","education","endemic","food-for-thought","inform","information","intellect","intellectual","israelmore-ayivor","learn","learning","lesson","library","new","obtain","people","prepare","prepared","read","reading","school","stay-alive","study","studying"],"id":6267,"author_id":"Israelmore+Ayivor"},{"text":"A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector may be forgotten and, peradventure, forgiven.","author":"E. Norman Torry","tags":["bibliophile","libraries","library","reading","tax-collector"],"id":6707,"author_id":"E.+Norman+Torry"},{"text":"Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.","author":"Oliver Wendell Holmes","tags":["library","try","something "],"id":7404,"author_id":"Oliver+Wendell+Holmes"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":603,"pages":61,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}