Quotes from Susan Orlean

Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in the mirror while punching you.

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

Kelso left Le Cadet on the shelf and then took what the Los Angeles Times called "a sensational and decidedly novel action"—namely, she sued Reverend Campbell for slander

Kelso maintained that the acquisition of the book was an expression of her free speech. Reverend Campbell argued that his right to pray for someone's soul was an expression of his free speech. As the lawsuit advanced, Reverend Campbell's right to free speech seemed to gain the moral upper hand

A real selfish love like yours old pal Is something I shall never know again And I must always be a better man Because you loved me greatly, Rin Tin Tin.

One of Manning's deputies pulled Elizabeth Teoman aside and told her he didn't know if they could do anything more because the fire was so intense and the building was so hospitable to it, with the stacks acting as fireplace flues and the books providing so much fuel. He asked her to give him a list of the irreplaceable items in the building, in case that was all they could save.

they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained. The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

At last count, in 2017, there were almost sixty thousand homeless people in Los Angeles.

but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away? It doesn't matter that I know I'm throwing away a bound, printed block of paper that is easily reproduced. It doesn't feel like that.

we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family.

The slavery was permitted under an 1850 California law that allowed white people to buy Native American children as "apprentices," and to "bid" on Native Americans who were declared "vagrant," and oblige them to work off the cost of the bid.

If all of this makes orchids seem smart—well, they do seem smart. There is something clever and un-plantlike about their determination to survive and their knack for useful deception and their genius for seducing human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years.

A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes

At this point I realized it was just as well that I never saw a ghost orchid, so that it could never disappoint me, and so it would remain forever something I wanted to see.

you read a book for the experience of reading it. You didn't read it in order to have an object that had to be housed and looked after forever, a memento of the purpose for which it was obtained.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. —William Faulkner, Light in August

Orchids are one of the few things in the world that can live forever.

Many people who collect orchids designate an orchid heir in their wills, because they know the plants will outlast them.

In a sense, then, the number of orchid species on the planet is uncountable because it is constantly changing.

To desire orchids is to have a desire that will never be, can never be, fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species on earth will certainly die before even coming close.

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad... The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day.

Christian Center. Scott was a Stanford Ph.D. from rural Idaho who described himself as "the most agnostic believer and the most believing agnostic.

Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as a expert in drying out wet things. The notion of putting the books in with groceries didn't faze Lundquist, since he'd freeze-dried his first salvaged books alongside a summer's worth of peas and carrots from his garden.

One magazine recently reported that a customer of one orchid kennel in San Francisco had so many plants that he was paying two thousand dollars in monthly rent.