Quotes from Susan Orlean

One morning, a real estate developer named Robert Maguire came for a meeting at the ARCO offices. He stood by a window and looked down on the library and the shambles it was becoming. At that moment, he made a decision to do what he could to fix it.

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

He was charming, funny, dimpled, daring. He could talk anyone into anything. He had a gift for drama and invention. He was a storyteller, a yarn-spinner, and an agile liar; he was good at fancying up facts to make his life seem less plain and mingy.

The department," she said in a choked voice, "the department got a letter from Mo Willems! Mo Willems! Can you believe it? Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! is one of my favorite books. Oh, I think I'm going to cry.

The problem with Harry was that he didn't just pick one lie and stick with it.

Four out of the five Nobel Prize laureates in Physics and Chemistry that year were from countries other than the United States. Americans were terrified that the country was falling behind in math and science, so nationwide there was a renewed commitment to education, especially in those fields.

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

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know.

According to librarian Glen Creason, the breeze was filled with "the smell of heartbreak and ashes.

when a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine.… it's a sort of madness.…

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.

understood how fundamental books were to Jewish culture, theology, and identity

It had raged for seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.

a brutal sense of loneliness, eased only by a place like the library, where lonely people can feel slightly less lonely together.

The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

Quoting a letter by Charles F. Lummis]: books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.

It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.

people of the book.

Connor said when they entered the building immediately after the fire, they felt like they'd died and gone to see if Dante knew what he was writing about.

The city of Los Angeles - dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors - was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been on the moon.

In the saga of humankind, most things are done for money—arson especially—but there is no money to be made by burning libraries. Instead, libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic.

Even books I don't want, or books that are so worn out and busted that they can't be read any longer, cling to me like thistles.

Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper, ink, and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.

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