330 Quotes by Susan Orlean

The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.

At the time, the library's fire prevention consisted of smoke detectors and handheld fire extinguishers. There were no sprinklers. The American Library Association, known informally as the ALA, always advised against sprinklers, because water damage was even worse for books than fire damage.

Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels like a marvelous and exceptional thing. All the things that are wrong in the world seems conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.

Okay, fuck the sundial. We'll just go straight and eventually we'll get there. What I mean is that we'll get somewhere. Out of here. I mean, logically, we have to get out as long as we walk straight. I've done this millions of times. Whenever everything's killing me, I just say to myself, screw it, and go straight ahead.

The mournfulness felt like a hand pressing on my chest.

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know.

Talking to him was like engaging in a fistfight with someone gazing at himself in the mirror while punching you.

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.