Librarian Quotes

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I'm just the librarian. I can only give you the books. I can't give you the answers.”
― Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures

“Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours.”
― Mia James, By Midnight

“If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.”
― Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl Volume I

“I'm a born librarian with a sex drive”
― David Bowie

“She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.”
― Sarah Beth Durst

“In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian. ”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.”
― Pseudonymous Bosch, The Name of This Book Is Secret

“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“She's right, of course. My mother usually is. She's a librarian.”
― Heather Vogel Frederick, Much Ado About Anne

“As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.”
― Erma Bombeck

“Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need”
― Judy Blume

“Evelyn: Look, I... I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am.
Rick: And what is that?
Evelyn: I... am a librarian.

The Mummy (1999)”
― Max Allan Collins, The Mummy

“In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“She's a librarian, Sim said. They're not teachers; don't give you half as much hassle. If there's a fire in the school and I've got to choose who I'm gonna save - a teacher or a librarian - the teacher's gonna burn every time.
(p. 24)”
― Keith Gray, Ostrich Boys

“If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the page in little puffs when you're reading something or looking at some pictures, kind of hypnotizing smell.

I think it's the smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You'll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up real slow and easy until it starts piling on a person's eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don't come back up at all. Then their mouths open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of of water for apples and before you know it... they're out cold and their face thunks smack-dab on the book.

That's the part that makes librarians the maddest. They get real upset if folks start drooling in the books”
― Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy

“Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.”
― Willard Scott

“Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Borrower

“Of all the places I have walked into, libraries must be the most magical. Have you ever opened the cover of a book and wondered what you would find inside? Where you would go? Whom you would meet? A story has the power to send you back in time or into the future, to transport you to other lands and kingdoms. I’ve met ogres, talking rabbits, and some of my best friends in the pages of books.
Librarians might just have the best jobs ever. With each library card they hand out, they offer a ticket to strange and marvelous worlds. Open a book and, like Reading Beauty, you might fall under a spell—the magic of a deep read. But chances are, unlike the Sleeping Beauty of the original fairy tale, you will never want the spell to be broken.”
― Kimberly Long Cockroft, Reading Beauty

“If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.”
― Graceanne A. Decandido

“Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“There's nothing like cataloguing books for taking your mind off things.”
― Mary Lou Kirwin, Killer Librarian

“Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.”
― David Davis, Librarian's Night Before Christmas

“. . . when a woman has a husband
And you've got none,
Why should she take advice from you?
Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare
And all them other highfalutin' Greeks. ”
― Meredith Willson

“Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“These were wise, modern children, and they knew: a mother could be a witch, a child could be a criminal. A librarian could be a thief.”
― Rebecca Makkai

“Librarian: taking the E.T. out of Libertarian.”
― Jud Barry

“Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for.”
― Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer