Washington Irving Quotes

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think, His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young. His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

Even if you aren't a believer, there are incredible stories in the 'good book' that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is - and by the way, Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.

Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.

Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages--and sages--and, simply put, there's something for everyone inside.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get his own belief.

Libraries hold the wisdom of the world and the stories of the ages - available to everyone, free of charge!

Libraries collect the works of genius of every language and every age.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

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

Print-based libraries developed in an age of scarce printed resources.

Books have always been to me like a kind of embalmed mind. The dead may be scattered, and who can find them, but their voices live in the library.

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.