Quotes from Susan Orlean

The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don't charge any money for that warm embrace. The commitment to inclusion is so powerful that many decisions about the library hinge on whether or not a particular choice would cause a subset of the public to feel uninvited.

Do you wake up one day and say "hey honey, let's have a baby goat and guava jam business"?

The library is a magnificent institution which nothing can hinder . . . except peanut politics

Even in Los Angeles, where there is no shortage of remarkable hairdos, Harry Peak attracted attention.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

They are saving books by returning them to their origins—to the tradition of oral storytelling, which gave stories their durability before paper and ink could.

Unexpectedly, Bradbury's description of books on fire isn't horrible; in fact, they seem marvelous, almost magical. He describes them as "black butterflies" or roasted birds, "their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers." In the book, fire isn't repulsive; it's seductive—a gorgeous, mysterious power that can transmute material objects.

This was a shrine to being forgotten; to memories sprinkled like salt; ideas vaporized as if they had never been formed; stories evaporated as if they had no substance and no weight keeping them bound to the earth and to each of us, and most of all, to the yet - unfolded future.

You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

After the business at hand was completed, the head of the board, a lawyer named Isidore Dockweiler, turned to Jones and asked her to resign. As Jones sat dumbfounded, Dockweiler explained that the board believed it would be in everyone's best interest to have a man run the library. He

In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place--it is a transit point, a passage.

It was like everyone shared the same great realization: the libraries have persisted, and they have grown, and they will certainly endure.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn't anywhere else that fits that description.

Chief Aguirre said as we began to walk around the building. "Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that's something to keep in mind.

Over the years, he has become a sort of library himsel: He is the repository of endless stories about the library's most interesting patrons.

Another trouble spot is the Computer Center. Aguirre said it creates a lot of "time conflicts," meaning that someone overstays his two-hour limit at a computer and someone else gets pissed.

He was a flawed, self-destructive person who blundered through life, but perhaps he had begun to feel something close to contentment.

Patron is a writer in Hebrew; wanted to create a pun between the word for Zion and the word for penis. We couldn't find a term for penis, but the word copulate is mtsayen which helped her make her pun with tsion.

In Religion, he gets a lot of complaints about people talking to God in overly loud voices.

It is hard to imagine a more perfect crime than one in which the weapon disappears and the act itself can unfold almost unnoticeably.

One of the guards told me that his position at the library feels more like that of a psychologist or a priest than a security guard.

Encyclopedias?" he asked George. "So damn heavy.

He kept repeating the story, adjusting it a touch each time, as if he were a tailor working on a jacket, taking in a bit of fabric here, letting out a seam there, then stepping back to consider what fit what best.