Quotes from Susan Orlean

He likes pretending to be stern and cynical, perhaps to hide the fact that he is a softie and deeply sentimental. He

In 1973, the library even added a service called the Hoot Owl Telephonic Reference, which operated from nine P.M. until one A.M., long after the library was closed. Dialing H-O-O-T-O-W-L connected you to a librarian who could find the answer to almost any question.

Or the octogenarian twins—Creason and his colleagues referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle—who came to the library daily, spending their time reading Herodotus and Thucydides and telling Creason the very same joke every day for seven years.

The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is

Victorian women were forbidden from owning orchids because the shapes of the flowers were considered too sexually suggestive for their shy constitutions, and anyway the expense and danger and independence of collecting in the tropics were beyond any Victorian woman's ken.

In a letter, he described it as "a painfully big city wherein dwell practically no native sons of The Golden West, but a heterogeneous mob of movie actors and actresses and emigrants from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa . . .

We are all whispering into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is a sheer act of defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

He was also pensive and neurotic, and suffered from inexplicable aches, unaccountable pains, and pervasive anxiety. He seesawed between bursts of ecstasy, which occurred when he was exposed to great art, and troughs of melancholy. His friends considered him mercurial and poetic. In his spare time, he enjoyed drawing intricate sketches of imaginary cities.

Books invite all; they constrain none.

to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn't understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. 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.

He called for it to be planted with olive trees, cypress, viburnum, and magnolia, all plants that might have been found in a classic Roman garden, which he felt would continue the experience of intellectual immersion.

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 was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.

We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.

I wanted fo have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn't anywhere else that fits that description. Perhaps in the future, OverDrive will be where our books will come from, and libraries will become something more like our town squares, a place that is home when you aren't at home.

If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger?

I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels like a marvelous and exceptional thing. All the things that are wrong in the world seems conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.

In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

The block had small offices and an outdoor arena where weekly slave-labor auctions were held. 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. (The law, known as Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, was not repealed entirely until 1937.)

The reading of the book was a journey.

The reading of a book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.

them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.