20th-century Librarian Quotes

Laura Bush
Archibald MacLeish
James H. Billington
Nella Larsen
Judith Krug
Vicki Myron

In November, the smell of food is different. It is an orange smell. A squash and pumpkin smell. It tastes like cinnamon and can fill up a house in the morning, can pull everyone from bed in a fog. Food is better in November than any other time of the year.

The most wide-flung task in the universe is the exploration of the universe itself.

Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of a game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play

So now she and I are friends - not with benefits, but memories.

Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

James H. Billington
James H. Billington
The eye of the heart, though closed in fallen man, is able to take in a glimmering of light and this is faith. But anyway of living causes a covering like rust to accumulate over the heart so that it cannot sense the Divine origin of Allah's message.

Coordinating the retreat was important too, so important that Jiaan had assigned Aram as Fasal's assistant, to be sure he didn't overlook anything important. Like the fact that they were supposed to retreat.

The good, the bad, that's just life. Let it go. There's no need to fret about the past. The question is: who are you going to share it with tomorrow?

Vicki Myron
Vicki Myron
A miracle is a single mom who works two jobs to care for her kids and still helps them with their homework at night. A miracle is a child donating all the money in their piggy bank to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. That's where you'll find the hand and face of God.

I mean, how would anyone learn anything if they weren't curious? How would scientists make discoveries? — We all have the right to be different, don't we?

In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate. She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot—not as sex but as divine woman—about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve.

I also want to encourage anyone who has been affected by hurricane Ka, uh, Karina...

Laura Bush
Laura Bush
A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.

Forks are absurd, he scoffed. They insult your food. They make it think you're killing it twice.

She [Irene] wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen
Abstractions have a limiting, a dehumanizing, a dehydrating effect on the relation to things of the man who must live with them. The result is that we are more and more left, in our scientific society, without the means of knowledge of ourselves as we truly are or of our experience as it actually is.

Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Material that might be illegal is such a minuscule part of what is available that we have to remember — and I mean not only librarians but everybody has to remember not to let it overshadow the incredible wealth of information that is available in this medium.

Judith Krug
Judith Krug
A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.

Don't waste time blaming yourself when you can spend time planning how to destroy our enemies.