Quotes from Susan Orlean

I would argue that it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear.

On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.

It's human nature to set a point in our minds when we feel triumphant and to measure everything that comes after it by how far we fall or rise from that point.

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

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

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.

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.

I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration - that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.

In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.

It's not really about collecting the thing itself," Laroche went on. "It's about getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become part of your life. It's a kind of direction." He stopped on the word "direction" and chortled. "If anybody had a plant I didn't have, I made sure to get it. It was like a heroin addiction. If I ever had money I would spend it on plants.

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 marvelous and exceptional. 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.

A book feels like a thing alive in the moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time.

Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot Phalaenopsis in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche's finishes were downright and absolute, and what's more, he also shut off any chance of amends.

In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. 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.

The library is a whispering post. 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.

There is nothing more melancholy than empty festive places.

Country living—and definitely living in the country with a lot of animals—isn't peaceful. It's full of blood and guts and murder and rivalry and treachery and chaos, in a lovely green pitiless world.

If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble—if only there could be a gathering up of permanence—how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach.

I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can't throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.

Quoting Althea Warren, librarians should "read as a drunkard drinks, or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they'd rather do it than anything else in the world.