Lorrie Moore Quotes

More people should use their library.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them

If anyone is really determined to lend you a book, you never can get out of it!

Why buy a book when you can join a library.

We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I'd read as many of those as I could.

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

There are far too many people for us to think about each of them during our short stay on earth—like the thousands of books in a library we haven’t time to read in an afternoon. But this is no excuse to cease browsing. For every now and then, we find that one book that reaches us deep inside and introduces us to ourselves. And, in someone else’s story, we come to understand our own.

Support your libraries... or else!

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

Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

Not reading a beautiful book again because you've already read it, that is, as if you were not visiting a dear friend again because you know him already.

One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.

A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.

The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

There is no frigate like a book and no harbor like a library, where those who love books but can't afford their own complete collections, or those who need a computer, or kids who need a safe place to read after school, or moms with toddlers who want their babies to learn to read, can all come together and share in a great community resource.

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

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.