Susan Orlean

Orlean re-opens the unsolved mystery of the most catastrophic library fire in American history and delivers a love letter to the institution of libraries themselves.

The Library Book

Emma Miller

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. 

Henry Stromberg

Katheryn

I am having a very similar experience at this point in my life.

AIl I know is that I lost my appreciation for the slow pace of making your way through a library and for having books on borrowed time. I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited.

We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. 

Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in a mirror while punching you.

A library is a good place to soften solitude

You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen… I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is and how necessary and full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.

 This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional.

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family.

The Library Book quotes

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