And the smell of the library was always the sameöthe musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup'.

-Ackroyd, Peter
  Chatterton, ch.5.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

-Doyle, SirArthur Conan
  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,'The Five Orange Pips'.

   Claustrum sine armario quasi castrum sine armamentario. Ipsum armarium nostrum est armamenturium. A cloister without a library is like a castle without an armoury. For the library is our armoury.

-Geoffrey de Breteuil   fl.12c
c.1165  Letter to Peter Mangot.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
^2  In The Rambler.

   The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
  Remark, 6  Apr. Collected in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.

The world isaglobal campus,Hilary, you'd betterbelieve it. The American Express card has replaced the library pass.

-Lodge, David John
  Small World, pt.1, ch.2.

Where do you get your taste in authorsöThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.

-O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone
^41  Tyrone. Long Day's Journey Into Night, act 4 (published 1956).

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge!† Depend upon it, Mrs Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

-Sheridan, Richard Brinsley
  SirAnthonyAbsolute.The Rivals, act1, sc.2.