Quotes from Susan Orlean

As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, 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.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. 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. The poet Milton called this quality in books "the potency of life.

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

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.

Sometimes it's harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It's almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.

They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

United Nations agenda. The manifesto states, "The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.

In the universe there are only a few absolutes of value; something is valuable because it can be eaten for nourishment or used as a weapon or made into clothes or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anything as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want.

do you think there are any conservative librarians?" Rosenberg was laughing so hard

It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

people hack into the library to rehearse hacking into bigger, more secure, and more valuable targets.

It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.

The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string.

The art critic and philosopher John Berger once said that we like to look at animals because it reminds us of the past and the  agrarian life that included the regular presence of animals.

Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn't get her period for the next four months.

books have souls

even though dogs break your heart, they fill it up, even when they're gone.

I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.

The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel—in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning.

Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people's university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.