6 Quotes by Martha Cooley

In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.

With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.

My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.

Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise.

Librarians, too, are gatekeepers – not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination.

My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian – the man in charge of the University’s entire collection – is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.