Quotes About Librarians

What I tend to get from America is very enthusiastic letters and e-mail from librarians and schoolteachers, the gatekeepers, though I hesitate to use that word. I've never been a huge seller.

When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either "You're joking, right?" or "They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?

Librarians hoard the wisdom of humanity. They are the keepers of all knowledge, the guardians at the temples of understanding and devoted protectors of the sanctuary in the midst of uneducated anarchy.

People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise.

The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.

Jeffrey Makala, the friendly and astute rare-books and special collections librarian who will be my guide, confirms my opinion that librarians, along with independent-bookstore owners and dedicated middle- and high-school teachers, are the most selfless guardians of literature on earth.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

In common with librarians the world over, the two women were used to dealing with a disproportionate quota of odd people acting strangely.

Librarians. . . have been my lifelong friends, guides and heroes.

If they've managed to bring more firepower than us, we deserve to lose. But we aren't going to lose, because we're the Page sisters and we're librarians.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise.

The average citizen would probably be surprised to learn how often librarians—many of whom had masters degrees—were called upon to dispose of diapers or unclog toilets, though this was not listed anywhere in their job description.

It's always 'a thousand years' in stories, even if it was eight hundred ten or fourteen hundred eighty. 'A thousand years' is dramatic, and drama means more to people than accuracy, I'll tell you that for free. That's how you get throngs of obedient morons, while the educated have to work doubly hard to keep records accurate. Historians and librarians have saved more lives than Healers.

You don't look like the librarians I remember," he told her. "We've changed. There was a whole press release issued about it, but we didn't get much media coverage.

Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (' Dual Attractions', 1999) nor Chris West (' Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies', 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in which Heinlein was writing, the editors he was writing for, or the librarians who could decide whether books did or did not make it onto the shelves in a period in which libraries were only just starting to retreat from the position of major purchasers.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

The trick is to get people to read anything, to engender the love of reading. Once you can read, you can teach yourself anything. Librarians are key, I think. They hold the power to empower.

The librarians that I've spoken to, the teachers and the librarians who really care and do advise parents and children of what's good and what's out there, they are very special. They have a kind of wisdom that a lot of people don't have.