34 Quotes by Marilyn Johnson

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.

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

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

The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.

We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

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.

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.

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.