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I’ve put together a few choice quotes and a list of the authors. After you’ve read the rest of the paper, why not get comfortable, pour yourself a cup of coffee and try your hand at matching up the quotes with the authors?
Better yet, try to figure out who said or wrote them BEFORE looking at the list of authors. (Note there are 20 quotes and only 18 authors. Two of the authors are quoted twice. They had a lot to say.)
1. Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all
2. The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
3. I’d be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of computers.
4. I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.
5. Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
6. As a child, my No. 1 best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
7. Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.
8. 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.
9. I think it is good that books exist, but they do make me sleepy.
10. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
11. At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.
12. If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library?
13. I hate reading.
14. Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
15. Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
16. I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
17. Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
18. I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
19. I took a speed-reading course and read “War and Peace” in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.
20. My days in the library … I liken them to the days spent by an opium addict in his little cell.
Carol Petrowski is a La Crosse County Library System staff member at the Onalaska Public Library.
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