330 Quotes by Susan Orlean

When it comes to consumer electronics, I’m a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can’t resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.

The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I’m always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.

Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn’t have to come in contact with it.

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 every day.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does – I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.

In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.

In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel – in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning.

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.