238 Quotes About Librarians

Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way.

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.

Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction.

I loved going to the library. It was the first time I ever saw Black newspapers and magazines like JET, Ebony, the Baltimore Afro-American, or the Chicago Defender. And I’ll never forget my librarian.

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us how to swim. – Linton Weeks, Washington Post, 13 January 2001

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you'd find and give it to me.

To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.