"The library in question must be a highly orthodox and conventional library. The body, on the other hand, must be a wildly improbable and highly sensational body." -- Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

"Books are fatal; they are the curse of the human race ... the greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing." -- Benjamin Disraeli

"... people just don't get murdered in public libraries. It's not done." -- Police Chief, in Murder in a library by Charles J. Dutton

"I've been collecting books for a long time. Once I killed two men in the same day, and this room [full of books] had an almost immediate healing effect." -- Cliff Janeway in Booked to Die by John Dunning

"Libraries are delightfully appropriate sites for mystery and murder. The atmosphere of quiet mustiness lends itself to the ominous. But more suggestive are the secrets and lore imprinted in the books, waiting to be misused." -- The Letter Killeth by Betty Rosenberg

"The world has been printing books for 450 years and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation." -- Roger Mifflin in The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley

"We don't go around murdering people in libraries these days." -- Head Librarian, in Dewey Decimated by Charles A. Goodrum

"The trouble with bookshops is that they are as bad as pubs. You start with one and then you drift to another, and before you know where you are you are on a gigantic book-binge." -- Bodies in a Bookshop by R.T. Campbell

"In detective stories, virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have." -- Lord Peter Wimsey in Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

"Libraries are accepted as such respectable institutions that when they are involved in murder, the melodramatic element is more prominent." -- Libraries and Librarians in Murder-Mystery-Suspense Fiction, 1931-1980 by Lisa Wall Williams

"Murder for the fun of it breaks all the rules of detective fiction." -- Harriet Vane in Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers

"Librarians are wonderful people. They should be in the detective business." -- The Chinese Doll, by Wilson Tucker

"What we want in our detective fiction is not a semblance of real life ... but deep mystery and conflicting clues." E.M. Wrong, Crime and Detection

"We are librarians, and therefore the elect of God. To read is human, to catalogue divine." --Dewey Death by Charity Blackstock

"A great book is a great evil." -- Callimachus

"Burglars, by the way, never do steal books; a very significant fact." -- Walter Murdoch

"Steal not this book, my honest friend,
For fear that the gallows be thine end." -- Bookplate

"If Hamlet had been written these days, it would probably have been called 'The Strange Affair at Elsinore'." -- Sir James Barrie