Quotes from Susan Orlean

transition from pre-Internet to omnipresent-Internet, and who was successfully rigging the library to sail into the future not as a gigantic, groaning, fusty pile of books but as a sleek ship of information and imagination.

In the meantime, as tax receipts dwindled, the library's budget was cut by almost a quarter.

The irony of the Feuersprüche was that they treated books as seriously as Jews did. To feel the need to destroy them acknowledged the potency and value of books, and recognized the steadfast Jewish attachment to them.

judicial bonfires, and even household stoves." The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that's something to keep in mind.

The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted.

air force bases, where libraries are revered.

Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read.

I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes.

fiction fiends.

a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage.

It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books.

a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.

award-winning, other growers will probably start working on hybrids with

Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.

The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy.

burst into tears.

cardinal sin in a library, where the commitment to findability is absolute.

Mao was a librarian who became a book burner.

She cocked her head at me. "You read and read and read and read," she said, "and then what?

This was in the early 1990s, the moment when Internet service providers were introduced to the general public, and for the first time in history, the status of libraries as the only and best storehouses of information was challenged. Szabo received his library degree just as people were beginning to wonder whether libraries were viable or even necessary in the newly wired world.

Althea Warren] believed librarians' single greatest responsibility was to read voraciously. Perhaps she advocated this in order to be sure librarians knew their books, but for Warren, this directive was based in emotion and philosophy: She wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite

the breeze was filled with "the smell of heartbreak and ashes.

After the stock market crash, book circulation rose by sixty percent, and the number of patrons almost doubled.