330 Quotes by Susan Orlean

When my son was born, and after a day of lying-in I was told that I could leave the hospital and take him home, I burst into tears. It wasn’t the emotion of the moment: it was shock and horror.

Being a good designer certainly doesn’t guarantee that you’re good at business. It’s probably more surprising when the two talents coexist in one person.

If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger?

Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets – ‘Althea’s Ways to Achieve Reading’ – to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity read. ‘The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you’re afraid she’ll catch it,’ she wrote in one of her tip sheets. ‘Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor.

I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?

I’m happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you’ve won the lottery.

I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time – it’s part of the fun for me as a writer.

In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.