Home > Work > The Library Book
161 " He hovered between what he didn’t want anymore and what he wasn’t very likely to have. "
― Susan Orlean , The Library Book
162 " The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. "
163 " Then it rose to 2500. The firefighters began to worry about a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface. As firefighters put it, it’s the moment when a fire in a room is transformed into a room on fire. With the temperature as high as it was, there was a great potential for flashover, which would have made the chance of saving anything nearly impossible. "
164 " It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more. "
165 " Connor-Dominguez said when they entered the building immediately after the fire, they felt like they’d died and gone to see if Dante knew what he was writing about. "
166 " This building was full of what it was missing. It was if the people who passed thorough had left a small indent in the air. "
167 " The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible. "
168 " Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived. It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited—it takes on a life of its own. "
169 " The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible.In the book, fire isn't repulsive; it's seductive - a gorgeous, mysterious power that can transmute material objects. Fire is "the thing man wanted to invent but never did."A library is a good place to soften solitude.All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen. "
170 " bookshelves-full-of-books family. "
171 " idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience "
172 " transition from pre-Internet to omnipresent-Internet, and who was successfully rigging the library to sail into the future not as a gigantic, groaning, fusty pile of books but as a sleek ship of information and imagination. "
173 " The irony of the Feuersprüche was that they treated books as seriously as Jews did. To feel the need to destroy them acknowledged the potency and value of books, and recognized the steadfast Jewish attachment to them. "
174 " Library users are eighty percent male, and librarians are eighty percent female, so that’s something to keep in mind. "
175 " The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. "
176 " air force bases, where libraries are revered. "
177 " Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. "
178 " 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. The poet Milton called this quality in books “the potency of life.” I wasn’t sure I had it in me to be a killer. "
179 " fiction fiends. "
180 " a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage. "