Home > Work > The Library Book

The Library Book QUOTES

The Library Book QUOTES

1 " The film industry began in 1910 with the production of D. W. Griffith’s movie In Old California and grew by bounds. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

2 " As he was discussing this with Sarao, it occurred to me that a large part of a city librarian’s job is to be a property manager. Szabo is responsible for seventy-three large structures that are spread across the 503 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. To even visit each one of the branches is a major proposition. Szabo’s days seesaw between big thoughts on the future of global information systems and minutiae such as requisitioning a city gardener to trim the weeds around the Washington Irving library. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

3 " Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical engineer and former popcorn distributor who had reinvented himself as a expert in drying out wet things. The notion of putting the books in with groceries didn't faze Lundquist, since he'd freeze-dried his first salvaged books alongside a summer's worth of peas and carrots from his garden. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

4 " We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

5 " We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

6 " With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, diligently and peacefully. The formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person the the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in the 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 everyday. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

7 " With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, diligently and peacefully. The formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person the the next, through the smoky building and out the door. 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 everyday. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

8 " Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

9 " 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. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

10 " 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. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage -- the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

11 " Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in the mirror while punching you. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

12 " Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something wose than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

13 " Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

14 " The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

15 " 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. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

16 " German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

17 " At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

18 " He tugged at his hair more, and then added, "He knew Burt Reynolds and what's-her-name that he married. Debra, what's that name?"
"Loni Anderson, Daddy," Debra said. She turned to me. "Harry knew them really well. He knew everything about them. He told me that Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson would get divorced way before anyone else knew. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

19 " Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book

20 " 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. Writing a book, just like building a library, is a sheer act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory. "

― Susan Orlean , The Library Book