Quotes from Susan Orlean

It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song - that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.

a novel that was romantic but not corny;

In fact, Perry was passionate, but his passion was exclusively for libraries, and he judged people by whether or not they shared his passion.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.

Work helped distract him from his morbid state of mind. The library wasn't his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity.

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.

Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than that they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling.

Another writer described the building as being "as frank and open and honest as the eyes 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.

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

In 1936, the Works Progress Administration established a Pack Horse Librarians unit to serve the mountain communities in Kentucky.

scientists have determined that staring at a smartphone screen for a long period of time induces a form of hypnosis).

This 'investigative' report just shows that homelessness is a problem. Not sure what the library has to do with it." Another commenter wrote, "I have news for everyone: This stuff doesn't just happen at the library. Welcome to L.A.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries - and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. 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.

In Beijing, about a third of library books are borrowed out of vending machines around the city.

One of the many optimistic convictions punctured by the riots was the belief that books were good and true - that on the shelves of libraries, you could find all the answers to all the questions. Life now seemed juddering and inexplicable, beyond the reach of what we could ever know or understand.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is 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.

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 world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

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

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.

Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.

I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?