We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
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.
I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.
Seeing Jennifer Holliday from 'Dreamgirls' perform on the Tony Awards telecast and later discovering Barbra Streisand by listening to her albums at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh really changed everything for me.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
My own perception of that is somewhat colored by where people ask my advice, which is still, of course, about changes to Python internals or at least standard libraries.
I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]
Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.
I want all my stuff to be converted into digital format so I can have my reference library to carry with me wherever I go.
I talk to a lot of librarians, and there's always a steady drumbeat of how libraries are places of community. But a lot of them have also recently - and just in the nick of time - refurbished, because during this economic downturn, people have a tend...
Dr. Peter Venkman: [to librarian Alice] Are you currently menstruating? Library Administrator: What has that got to do with anything? Dr. Peter Venkman: Back off man, I'm a scientist.
Benjamin: Elaine, would you just tell me where he proposed to you? Benjamin: [shouting after her as she leaves the library] Oh God, it wasn't in his car, was it?
[after seeing a rat while searching for a secret route to the library] William of Baskerville: The rats love parchment even more than scholars do. Let's follow him!
Librarian: Sir, wouldn't you be more comfortable in a study room? [Andrew looks up and sees people in the library staring at him] Andrew Beckett: No. Would it make you more comfortable?
A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, publ...
She hadn't met Earth or Fire, the other two cousins, but she'd filled a couple of library requests for each of them in the past week. If they were around, they would help her. Wouldn't they?
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.
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.
