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Public Library Quotes

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.
- Marc Andreessen

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

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.
- Keith Richards

I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.
- Robert Bloch

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
- Samuel Johnson

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
- Ray Bradbury

Why can't I just Google it like everything else?! I hate you public library system!
- Vera Brosgol

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.
- Charles Bukowski

Here is the treasure chest of the world - the public library, or a bookstore.
- Ben Carson

The public library is the most dangerous place in town
- John Ciardi

The public library is where place and possibility meet.
- Stuart Dybek

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.
- Leo Tolstoy

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.
- Bell Hooks

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.
- John Jakes

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
- Barbara Kingsolver

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
- Charles Kuralt

The institution of a public library, containing books on education, would be well adapted for the information of teachers, many of whom are not able to purchase expensive publications on those subjects.
- Joseph Lancaster

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
- Doris Lessing

A zoo is a cultural institution. Like a public library, like a museum, it is at the service of popular education and science. And by that token, not much of a money-making venture for the Greater Good and the Greater Profit are not compatible aims.
- Yann Martel

For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing.
- W Somerset Maugham

Sure." Olivia smirked. "Good ol' New York Public Library. I'm sure it's up to date on the latest Demons that escape through well-guarded Demon Gates.
- Cheyenne Mccray

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.
- Patrick Ness

As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted and obtuse among the citizenry
- Joyce Carol Oates

Dulcie always found a public library a little upsetting, for one saw so many odd people there..
- Barbara Pym

There is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
- Daniel Quinn

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.
- Mark Ruffalo

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
- Jose Saramago

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.
- John Sladek

On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free.
I gorged myself until my tummy ached.
- Craig Thompson

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.
- Clyde Tombaugh

...I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.'
What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.'
Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.
- John Kennedy Toole

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
- Andrew Wiles

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