Susan Orlean

“It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library,...”

“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 A...”

“With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, dilig...”

“With Lundquist directing, the volunteers worked for the next three days around the clock. Most were strangers to each other, drawn together unexpectedly, and worked together for hours, dilig...”

“Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn't get her period for the next four months.”

“Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Vall...”

“The city of Los Angeles—dirty, motley, teeming with immigrants and actors—was only an hour away. Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociologi...”

“We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depressi...”

“We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depress...”

“Overnight, the city managed to procure thousands of cardboard boxes, fifteen hundred hard hats, a few thousand rolls of packing tape, and the services of Eric Lundquist, a mechanical enginee...”

“Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the pote...”

“I wanted fo have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.”

“I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I'd visited.”

“The reading of a book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.”

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

“[Quoting a letter by Charles F. Lummis]: books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”

“My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on...”

“The one thing I've discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been wa...”

“I don't care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How c...”

“Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination servic...”