Christopher Morley Quotes

[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

One day, when I own a house, I'll keep a library full of books. Books are different from other possessions-they're more like friends.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

I read a lot of highly unsuitable books for an 11-year-old. I was desperate to read as widely as possible. I thought, 'There are so many places I am never going to get the chance to visit, but I can if I read them.' And I did. I could go anywhere in the world - and off it - by reading.

A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.