In this post, you will find great Library Quotes from famous people, such as Jessye Norman, Lawrence Clark Powell, Tony Benn, Diana Gabaldon, Henry Rollins. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library… When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.
When I turned 35, I thought, ‘Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I’m going to start writing a book on my next birthday.’ I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.
I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it. I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children‘s section.
When I was growing up, if there was a Young Adult section of my town’s library, I missed it. I wandered right from ‘The Babysitter‘s Club’ over to Stephen King. His books were big and fat and they seemed important. I eventually worked my way through most of the shelf, but ‘It’ is the one that stuck with me.
When I was 14, I saw a library for the first time.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.
Without the library, I would have been lost.
I have very happy memories of fairy tales. My mother used to take me to the library in Toronto to check out the fairy tales. And she was an actress, so she used to act out for me the different characters in all these fairy tales.
The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It’s a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I’m writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I’m actually there and doing the writing.
I was always the person in our class who was fascinated by new plays. I would go to the library all the time as new plays would come out.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
I grew up in the ‘hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.
I worked in restaurants, and I worked in the Cambridge Public Library.
You go to your public library, or you call your fire department or police department, what do you think you are calling? These are socialist institutions.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
You read a book, write a detailed review as proof you’ve read it, and they give you a badge. That’s where my competitive nature came out. Give me the badges! I would sit in the library all day, not ‘cos I loved reading, just because I needed those badges.
My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing – communication devices. I grew up between my father’s laboratory and my mother’s library.
I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.
I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.
I was an early reader, reading even before kindergarten, and since we did not have books in my home, my older brother, Alexander, was responsible for our trip every week to the public library to exchange books already read for new ones to be read.
I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.
Typically, if you buy a studio with a library, their library is pretty well licensed out many years in advance, so you are not really gaining access to the programming in that way.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don’t get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
My kids have grown up knowing that their mom made a big investment in making sure there was art and language instruction in school and books in the library. Hopefully, they’ve internalized that.
I bought a former library, not because I have a lot of books, but also I like architecture, and it was built in 1965, and I like gardening.
As a journalist I’m comfortable doing library research, and I did a lot! I had a fellowship at Radcliff for a year which gave me access to the Harvard system.
There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you’re open to them.
I try to give the music more of a campfire feel as opposed to a library atmosphere. I like when you can hear people hanging out in the songs and doing a little shuffling. It creates a feeling of participation.
I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.
I didn’t even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn’t afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.
An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.
I started doing a Ph.D., and then I thought, ‘I don’t really want to spend all this time on my own in the library.’
I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.
For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.
I was lucky enough to have a mother who took me to the library – the public library – twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. And also bought me books. And also read aloud to me.
When I was nine, I found a copy of ‘Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series’ in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.
And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that’s the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right?
I traveled to a library in South Africa called ILAM (International Library of African Music), which has a collection of about 500 different instruments that don’t really exist anymore.
I have an iPod, but I put my music in it from my CDs, and then I have that CD in my library.
A family living at the poverty level is unlikely to be able to afford a computer at home. Even with a computer, access to the Internet is another significant expense. A child might borrow a book from a public library; but it is not possible to take a computer home.
Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.
This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.
I always wanted to be a children’s author, and I have a really big library of children’s books. All the ones from when I was little, they are just so beautiful. I read kids’ books, and they calm me down.
If I was at home, I’d find myself checking email and looking at the Internet when I should be working. In the library, I can get an awful lot done in a couple of hours, but it can become quite sociable, which you have to watch out for. There are a lot of people you can pop out and have a coffee with.
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.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
I got my first library card, for Hendon Library in north London, when I was two years old.
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Immigrants use the library often. A lot of them don’t have access to books and Internet at home. They seem so disconnected to the city.
My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.
Thanks to modern technology, we now can deliver every text in every research library to every citizen in our country, and to everyone in the world. If we fail to do so, we are not living up to our civic duty.
I used to read music books when I was 13. My mom was working at a library. She’s a librarian. I would get my mom to check out any kind of books that had anything to do with the music industry. I read a lot about royalities, publishing, marketing, stuff like that.
Your library is your paradise.
I lived in the library with my grandmother as a child. I still love the smell of books; the library card is still my friend.
On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems ‘Native Guard.’ I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building.
With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.
We got a copy of the ‘New Statesman‘ at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The ‘Statesman’ came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
I had no inclination to perform as a kid. I was a shy child – I always had my nose in a library book. I didn’t start acting until I went to college. Once I started, it seemed to fit like a glove. I felt completely at home on stage. It was the perfect way for me to express myself, even better than writing.
I don’t really generate material specifically for the Kingsway Music Library. It’s just a product of the way I work.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids’ novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was coming up, but it feels almost ancient that you had to go to the library and you had ‘World Book Encyclopedias.’
I discovered Deborah Ellis’s books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
We’ve always read to the kids, every night both kids get books. That’s really important, and they love books. Our daughter is obsessed with reading and books, so it’s really sweet. She has her own little personal library.
The idea of a national digital library has been in the air for a long time, and there was a danger that some people would feel that it’s their property, so to speak.
Everything started with my mom. When I was five, she asked me if I wanted to sign up for soccer, but I had some pretty wild contract demands. ‘I’ll only play if you’re my coach.’ So my mom went to the library and brought home a bunch of books on how to coach soccer, and that was it. She was my first manager.
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
I have been involved in lots of crossover and event books, and the truth is, I dearly love them. I love stories that actually take advantage of the huge DC library and catalog – that stuff thrills me.
I’ve seen the most remarkable thing. It’s in the New York Public Library. They’ve got the original typescript of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest‘ – all four acts of it.
I think that once you start writing songs, you start developing a library of ideas that you can go and take from, so it gets easier as you go.
When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.
I have encountered those who feel that libraries have served their purpose and are no longer needed. There are those who consider them a soft target when it comes to local authority budget cuts. In certain political quarters, there is a refusal to see that our public library service needs active protection.
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
I once called construction companies to bid on an addition to the school library so that there would suddenly be people outside, measuring the building. ‘Who authorized this?’ the principal would ask. The answer: ‘Howie Mandel.’
I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
I’ve become completely obsessed with Netflix original programming. ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ are two of my new favorite shows. I also love having access to such an amazing library of film and television and have watched some truly enlightening documentaries.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn’t one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
Television is like a library. There are a lot of library books in it, and you have to pick and choose what you take out of it.
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.
A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
My grandmother had a Ph.D in library science, so I grew up in a library, and I would appreciate those books and the smell of them and how they’d have these series, and it was cool to me. I always felt like, if I had an opportunity, I’d create an album that felt like a series.
L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border.
My office in New York is overflowing with all kinds of cookbooks, and in New Orleans we have a huge culinary library. So yeah, I guess I’m a little bit obsessed.
Yes, there’s such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o’clock in the morning. You’ll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o’clock in the morning.
There should not be a micro-managing of terminology with the Library of Congress.
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.
The tradition, particularly in old-school British detective things, is everybody‘s in the drawing room or the library, and they’re all gathered, and the detective walks around and tells them where they were that night, and you see the flashbacks.
As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children’s library until I finished the children’s library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
The library is seen as a force for self improvement and the pursuit of knowledge. I fear that in many cases this is no longer true, if it ever was.
I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.
In reality, handing over public space to private developers does not guarantee that new library spaces will be comparable in size or otherwise remain fully-functional.
Our house has a library – it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! – and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There’s nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.
You can spend a day in a library and feel: ‘Great, I’ve done a day’s work.’ But it’s only research, not writing.
I haven’t been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children’s literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.
I was an engineering student and spent a lot of time in the library, and no one applauds when you finish your calculations.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of ‘The Other Side of Midnight‘ by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.
As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.
People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.
Think of a public library, worth more for those who cannot afford numerous books. Think of a public waterway or fishing ground. All types of commons have imputed monetary value that together comprise a source of social income. As such, the commons reduces economic inequality and insecurity in society.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.
I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere‘s a research library and I can’t get an elitist kick from it any more.
My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that’s all.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
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.
Now, many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.
I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.
When ‘The Awakening‘ was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author’s home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don’t get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.
I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.
Why buy a book when you can join a library.
People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.
Every weekend from, like, 1974 to 1978, I’d trudge over to the Greenwich library, which gathered up almost every major newspaper in the country. I would sit there all day long and read and read and read the reviews. I remember being twelve or thirteen and writing to Judith Crist, Pauline Kael, and Roger Ebert.
I have this book club, and we don’t read one book; we offer up a few suggestions and create a library over time.
I loved doing problems in school. I’d take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem – Fermat’s Last Theorem.
When I went to university, I got work experience at my local radio station, and I used to spend hours in what was then the CD library. I was supposed to be filing the CDs, but I was actually randomly picking stuff up and blaring it out of the speakers.
In 2009, the American Library Association recorded 460 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom.
I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.
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.
As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn’t even list ‘homosexuality’ as a topic.
Your library is your portrait.
I plan to live on campus in a dormitory and to do all the things any other student of the law school might do: use the library, eat in the dining hall, attend classes.
Libraries function as crucial technology hubs, not merely for free Web access, but those who need computer training and assistance. Library business centers help support entrepreneurship and retraining.
By about age 12, I would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep. I started learning. I started going to the library and reading. But it was initially just watching the stars from my bedroom that I really did. There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night.
The first thing I remember when I moved to a school in the suburbs was, ‘My gosh, all these books!’ The classroom and school had a library; I’d never seen so many books in my life! It was something we didn’t have in the township.
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it’s fresh.
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It’s such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.
A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world.
I wasn’t a great student, but I was interested in this theater thing, and I could spend hours in the library researching why the cuffs in the 18th century had four buttons. It was my handle.
Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.
I always say that the real success of Wine Library wasn’t due to the videos I posted, but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward, making connections and building relationships.
The library helps lower- and middle-income people – immigrants – get their shot at the American dream.
A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you’d like to know.
When I went to university, I got work experience at my local radio station, and I used to spend hours in what was then the CD library. I was supposed to be filing the CDs, but I was actually randomly picking stuff up and blaring it out of the speakers.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.
A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
When I think about music in the future, I don’t make a distinction between what’s radio, what used to be the music library, and so on.
The London Library in Piccadilly is the best place for a sleep.
If I’m researching something strange and rococo, I’ll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.
It’s one thing looking up your own book in a library, but imagine being able to look up your own word in the dictionary.
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.
I read the ‘New Yorker‘ when I was a kid. I used to love the cartoons and pick the cartoons out of the library, so I felt I knew the world of their cartoons.
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.
When I was sixteen, I borrowed a copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘ from the mobile library. Democrats and Republicans were standing for very different principles, and I could see which side was going to represent me.
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.
After 20 years and 250 mainstream films, I thought I should have in my library at least 50 films, films that will be talked about when I am no more.
Youku Tudou is a hybrid, like combining Netflix and YouTube. Like Netflix, with Youku, which launched in 2005, we syndicate a library of longform content and create original content. The Tudou model started with user-generated content but is increasingly becoming about partner-generated programming.
My music library has about every genre of music possible. I’ve really gotten into Ray LaMontagne, He makes amazing music, so I listen to him, and he’s a great artist.
Three times a year, there’s Strategicon convention, and I go for the board games. It happens Presidents Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day weekends. You go and take a look at the new board games and meet a couple of board game designers, and you can check out games you don’t own from the library and then return them.
If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
At some point, I picked up an old library copy of ‘To The Lighthouse‘ someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn’t stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.
Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.
The end of ‘Hollow City’ left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that’s just where ‘Library of Souls‘ begins.
I found a book in my elementary school library when I was ten called ‘All about You’ which was a book on the human body. I was hooked.
I’ve always loved to paint – I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model – and I’ve being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.
I discovered Deborah Ellis’s books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.
I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.
I am hard-pressed to find a successful writer who doesn’t have a similar story to mine – transformation through the public library.
In London, I discovered a peculiar building by Holland Park where the globe was shrunk to fit a British perspective, but which had a library with Sri Lankan books I had never seen before.
I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
Google’s library plan was staggering and exciting – it wasn’t the idea I objected to, but the method.
It was 1953, and I was still at school. I’d borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had ‘Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.’
From fifth grade on, I worked at our public library. The pay, a pittance, was almost superfluous. All through high school, I looked forward to summer as the time when I could work at the library four or five days a week. I was never a camp counselor, a lifeguard, a scooper of ice cream.
Both my mum and dad were great readers, and we would go every Saturday morning to the library, and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature, and all of us would come with an armful of books.
I went to the library – and this was before the Internet – and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.
When I won my way to the international science fair, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It was the first time I was going to be away from home, the first time taking an airplane. I went to the local library, checked out every single etiquette book, and I read those books like I was uncovering some sort of treasure.
I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.
I collect musical theatre anthologies. I have a whole library of them.
Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin‘s granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine – oil on canvas – in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother’s house.
My Alma mater was books, a good library… I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
A well-run, well-stocked library with access to great books as well as the Internet is essential.
I started creative writing classes at Aberdeen Central Library, and the writer-in-residence there, Todd McEwen, encouraged me a great deal. He showed my stories to his editor, and I thought that was just what happened to everyone who took his classes!
The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.
