I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children–and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast–or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps. Marilyn Johnson
To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.
-
Unknown
Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.
-
Sidney Sheldon
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
-
Stephen Fry
YOU ARE JUSTYou are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong. You are not just rich or poor, but always wealthy in the mind and heart. You are not perfect, but flawed. You are flawed, but you...
-
Suzy Kassem
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
-
Mark Twain
More Quotes By Marilyn Johnson
Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.
We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession, " one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity.... There's a subversive...
We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about...
