At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

...keep an eye out for crazed librarians, please!

Without the library, you have no civilization.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

yet. I’m starting to think that if the Internet is the CB radio of the nineties, then the home computer is the trailer park of the soul, a dangerous tool in the hands of idiots. Eventually self-imposed fascism will destroy man as he convinces himself he doesn’t have to think anymore. SEPTEMBER

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

The tragedy is that there are many walking encyclopedias who are living failures.

What the world-wide Web did to the demotic character is hard to define. It made still more general the nerveless mode of existence – sitting and staring – and thus further isolated the individual. It enlarged the realm of abstraction; to command the virtual reduces the taste for the concrete. At the same time, the contents of the Internet were the same old items in multiplied confusion. That a user had ‘the whole world of knowledge at his disposal’ was one of those absurdities like the belief that ultimately computers would think – it will be time to say so when a computer makes an ironic answer. ‘The whole world of knowledge’ could be at one’s disposal only if one already knew a great deal and wanted further information to turn into knowledge after gauging its value. The Internet dispensed error and misinformation with the same impartiality as other data, the best transferred from books in libraries.

The last 20C report on the working of the “world-wide web” was that its popularity was causing traffic jams on the roads to access and that the unregulated freedom to contribute to its words, numbers, ideas, pictures, and foolishness was creating chaos — in other words, duplicating the world in electronic form. The remaining advantage of the real world was that its contents were scattered over a wide territory and one need not be aware of more than one’s mind had room for.

The Library was outmoded and archaic — it had been so even in Ebling Mis's time — but that was all to the good. Pelorat always rubbed his hands with excitement when he thought of an old and outmoded Library. The older and the more outmoded, the more likely it was to have what he needed. In his dreams, he would enter the Library and ask in breathless alarm, 'Has the Library been modernized? Have you thrown out the old tapes and computerizations?' And always he imagined the answer from dusty and ancient librarians, 'As it has been, Professor, so it is still.

I'd sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I'd get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I'd add it to my reading list. Then I'd follow another link to a book review. I'd add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book — third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I'd retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.

…in the library…surrounded by things far more dangerous than what roamed the school corridors. For here thoughts were housed.