Quotes from Susan Orlean

It was said of Dante that he always had time for lechery.

He also began writing his own column. He called it "In the Lion's Den" and wrote it in the voice of an opinionated English-speaking mountain lion.

The Central Lending Library in Liverpool was completely ruined. (The rest of the city's libraries stayed open throughout the Blitz, maintaining regular hours and levying the usual overdue fines.)

By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history.

Compared to the mute towers around it, the library seemed more a proclamation than a building.

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. That has always been part of its charm, Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves.

sparking floor fan resulted in the loss of all the books in Temple University's law library in 1972.

Los Angeles seemed to always be moving toward the eternal future; it was a city that shed memories before they had a chance to stick.

Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places.

Once we started with the orchids, we've never looked back," he said. "I grew to be quite in love with them, you know. I like them because they're slightly evil and slightly mysterious, don't you think? In the early days I found it hard to make them flower, and when I did, it was a great, great triumph. They are a great, great challenge. They sulk, they pout, they ignore you. But it's onward with the orchids!

as frank and open and honest as the eye of a little child. It looks one in the face and knows no fear or shame. It has nothing to explain and need make no apologies.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.

Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual's consciousness is a collection of memories we've cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die.

Unlike older generations, people under thirty are also less likely to have office jobs. Consequently, they are always looking for pleasant places to work outside their homes. Many end up in coffee shops and hotel lobbies or join the booming business of coworking spaces. Some of them are also discovering that libraries are society's original coworking spaces and have the distinct advantage of being free.

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

The film industry began in 1910 with the production of D. W. Griffith's movie In Old California and grew by bounds.

In 1921, actor Fatty Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of an aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe, who had been drunk and injecting morphine at the time of her murder.

In 1949, UNESCO published a Public Library Manifesto to establish the importance of libraries on the United Nations agenda. The manifesto states, "The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.

This building was full of what it was missing.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang of the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.