An old librarian once said to me, ” whatever we deal with, coming here is always a visual reward.

There is a great case to be made for using religion to win arguments, as long as you only debate with other believers.

I love to tell kids that everything in the library is theirs. “We just keep it here for you.” One million items that you can have for free! Collection that represents an answer to just about any question you could ask. A bottomless source of stories and entertainments and scholarly works and works of art.

I love to tell kids that everything in the library is theirs. “We just keep it here for you.” One million items that you can have for free!

Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.

When I was his age, and even today, when it comes to books and libraries, too much is never enough.

I smiled at these books every time I saw them on my shelves. In many ways I sill feel like an incomplete person, but at least I had those books; I was more complete than anyone unlucky enough not to have them.

You can repent of most sins by making restitution, but you can’t bring a dead body back to life, and you can’t restore your virginity. We are made in God’s image, and God is no fornicator.

For Orwell, the loss of a life was the loss of a mind was the loss of a world, and the world we inhabit is poorer for each loss, for the contributions that mind could have made.

I’m rarely at a loss for words outside the library. But within its walls I’m required to form sentences that no logical person should ever have to utter, for instance, “You can’t sleep on the floor at the library under your blanket.