Quotes from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“A library doesn’t need windows, Andrew. We have books, which are windows into worlds we never even dreamed possible.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Because, my dear friends, these twelve children have lived their entire lives without a public library. As a result, they have no idea how extraordinarily useful, helpful, and funful - a word I recently invented - a library can be. This is their chance to discover that a library is more than a collection of dusty old books. It is a place to learn, explore, and grow!" -Mr. Lemoncello”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“An open book is an open mind" -Charles Chiltington”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“But the player librarians all over the country were raving about most was Marjory Muldauer from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. A gangly seventh grader, a foot taller than any of her competitors, Marjory Muldauer had memorized the ten categories of the Dewey decimal system before she entered preschool.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“And for the first time in his life, Kyle Keeley wanted to check out a library book more than anything in the world.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“A library doesn't need windows, Andrew. We have books, which are windows into worlds we never even dreamed possible" -Dr. Zinchencko”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“KNOWLEDGE NOT SHARED REMAINS UNKNOWN. —LUIGI L. LEMONCELLO”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“ ‘Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.’—Groucho Marx.” Bells”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Because, like Sherlock says to Dr. Watson, ‘it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Mr. Lemoncello bounced across the stage like a happy grasshopper.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Coming up from the basement, Kyle saw Andrew Peckleman in the middle of the Rotunda Reading Room, opening a long metal box sitting on top of the center desk. The holographic image of Mrs. Tobin was there, smiling patiently, as Peckleman pulled some kind of magazine out of the box. Miguel was also near”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Chiltington was a snake. Worse. A garden slug. Maybe a leech. Something oily and slimy that left a greasy trail and liked to mooch off other people’s ideas.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Kyle still had a shot. A long shot, but, hey, sometimes the”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“every woman’s mind is her kingdom. Rule it wisely, lassie.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Kyle was busy helping Holmes figure out that the Red-Headed League was just a clever ploy pulled by some robbers to get a red-haired pawnbroker to leave his shop long enough for them to dig a tunnel from his basement to the bank next door when the librarian’s voice jolted him out of London and brought”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

“Haley remembered another bit of Irish wisdom, something her dad said all the time: “Never bolt your door with a boiled carrot!” She”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

About the author

Popular quotes

“What strange times we live in, when good must disguise itself in the tawdry rags of evil!”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

“I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them.
It's for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write? My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head. And the adventure is endless and inexhaustible. If I learn to build the right vehicle, then I can discover even more territories. And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying

“She couldn’t run away from him. She’d be running from her own heart.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, quote from All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire

“I'm afraid we shall waste an awful lot of time."
"Don't worry," answered Snufkin, "we shall have wonderful dreams, and when we wake up it'll be spring.”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Finn Family Moomintroll

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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