Raymond Chandler Quotes

I hate requests. They make me feel unhappy. It's like when I take a book out of the library. As soon as I start to read it, all I can think about is when I'll finish it.

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials. You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach. All you need is the willingness to read.

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.

Books should go where they will be most appreciated, and not sit unread, gathering dust on a forgotten shelf, don't you agree?

[General James Mattis] a very talented individual. He's - has a personal library of about 10,000 books and he's read most of them on military history and strategy and so forth.

Health information is just about the number one thing that people go into public libraries and connect to public libraries for. They're also looking for information about things that can make their lives better. It's a great equalizer.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

The woman dashed up the staircase toward the library's main doors. Arriving at the top of the stairs, she grabbed the handle and tried desperately to open each of the three giant doors. The library's closed, lady. But the woman didn't seem to care. She seized one of the heavy ring-shaped handles, heaved it backward, and let it fall with a loud crash against the door. Then she did it again. And again. And again. Wow, the homeless man thought, she must really need a book.

A library is a place where you learn what teachers were afraid to teach you.

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

...and best of all, the wilderness of books, in which she could wander, where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her.

A library is never complete. That’s the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.

In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

You are a shelf of books without the pages.

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

Some men have only one book in them, others a library.