330 Quotes by Susan Orlean

Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways.

People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises – the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.

The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired.

Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it’s a good story or just a seductive one?

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

Among all life forms, there are creatures with charisma and creatures without. It’s one of those ineffable qualities we can’t quite define, but we all seem to respond similarly to.

It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.