Quotes from Susan Orlean

My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project—wanted, and then needed, to write it—was my realization that 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. Is the circuit

The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.

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. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.

librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.

I wanted to believe what I was learning about Harry, but the more I heard, the more his life seemed like a series of tall tales, conjured scenes full of wishful thinking. I came to believe that it was quite unlikely that Burt Reynolds had ever met Harry Peak at all.

The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve. All libraries can do is try their best to manage it.

Stearns Baker, one of the wealthiest women in

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

If you developed diphtheria, spotted fever, or the plague while you were in possession of a library book, you were required to inform the library, and the book had to be fumigated before it was put back in circulation, but the library covered the cost. Three

A book feels like a thing alive in this 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. 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.

People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.

Unlike older generations, people under thirty are also less likely to have office jobs. Consequently, they are always looking for pleasant places to work outside their homes. Many end up in coffee shops and hotel lobbies or join the booming business of coworking spaces.

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

The mournfulness felt like a hand pressing on my chest.

the board believed it would be in everyone's best interest to have a man run the library.

Books cannot be killed by fire," he declared. "People die, but books never die.

the cubicles of sin

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.

On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned

the kind of person who liked to have two cigarettes going at the same time.

The ban against tall buildings was finally lifted in 1957. Nothing much happened at first; downtown remained stunted compared to most other cities of its size. As developer Robert Maguire put it, Los Angeles seemed destined to be a city "just ten stories high, all over hell and gone.

The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering.

Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets—"Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading"—to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity to read.

An arson investigator I met described Peak entering a courtroom "with all that hair," as if his hair existed independently.