Quotes from Marilyn Johnson

Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy , was privacy --for their patrons and themselves.

We are all living history, and it's hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing's certain, though: if we throw it away, it's gone.

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.

Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.

It's almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.

You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists' photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.

Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?

Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help . They want to help us . They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.

Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.

It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.

This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.

One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts—who can say when that will come in handy?

So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers.

Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.

One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages—no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions.

Someday, I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they'll read anything.)

one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "[...] the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity…There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.