“Truth to tell, I'm right proud of Glory. She's standing up for what she believes is right. All of us should lead our children to do that, don't you know?”

“There's more to stories than it seems at first looking," she said. "Two sides to most stories. Folks better be thinking about that for once.”

“Real secrets mean more than hiding that card game from you daddy. Real secrets can be hurtful. Make people do bad things.”

“Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.”

“She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be weari...”

“For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.”

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving...”

“Senator John Stennis:The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.”

“The greatest evil in our country today is...ignorance...We need to be taught to study rather than to believe.”

“Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hou...”

“The better the school library, the higher the reading scores.”

“All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.”

“my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.”

“Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library.”

“If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle. ”