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1 " The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks. "
― Laura Whitcomb , A Certain Slant of Light (Light, #1)
2 " In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar. "
― Anne Fadiman , Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
3 " Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home. "
― Stephen King , The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)
4 " In a second-hand bookshop head to the back, find the old books with dust undisturbed and worn off covers for these clothe true treasures. "
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5 " He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old. "
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton , The Coming Race
6 " There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward. "
― Peter Ackroyd , The House of Doctor Dee
7 " Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of " 1" for the second " h" in the word " hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. (" The Vane Sisters" ) "
8 " I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my most loved places in the world. It was always peaceful there. Each and every moment I spent their searching for books or walking on unknown paths with the un-quenching thirst for knowledge, is cherished in my mind forever. The dark dusty corners all brown and the smell of old books untouched by readers for years, the quiet long walking passages between overloaded bookshelves were places where my magical world existed. "
― Ama H. Vanniarachchy
9 " Scent of old books a mystery "
10 " I will come,' the priest answered, 'for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood. "
11 " I run my fingers down the spines of old books and ancient tales. I smell the ink and feel the pages as I delicately peer at the words and paragraphs. Each book home to a story, giving its characters immortality. I smile and think that perhaps someday, I will make a home out of these pages too. And sit on a shelf, ready and waiting to share my story with the next reader. "
― Liz Newman
12 " Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings. "
― Gerald Durrell
