Librarians Quotes
84 quotes
"Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians."
"Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid."
"Don't mark up the Library's copy, you fool! Librarians are Unprankable. They'll track you down! They have skills!"
"If she can't spell, why is she a librarian? Librarians should know how to spell."
"The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap."
"Jace's eyes sparkled, but he said calmly, "Not at all. the Silent Brothers can help her retrieve her memories.""You hate the Silent Brothers," protested Isabelle."I don't hate them," said Jace candidly."I'm afraid of them. It's not the same thing.""I thought you said they were libarians," said Clary."They are librarians."Simon whistled. "Those must be some killer late fees."
"Librarians hoard the wisdom of humanity. They are the keepers of all knowledge, the guardians at the temples of understanding and devoted protectors of the sanctuary in the midst of uneducated anarchy."
"I was just turned last week. I'm a librarian."He stilled, as if I'd just told him I was the inventor of the tube top. "I watched a movie about a librarian once. Well, she was a librarian by day, a call girl by--"I stopped him with a quick lift of an eyebrow. "If you finish that sentence, we cannot be friends."
"...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth."
"...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.''But you have just told me you were sexton here!''So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!"
"A library bears similar qualities to a hospital. Librarians are like doctors, books the prescriptions."
Trudy Wallis, Longbourn Library: A Novel of Pride, Prejudice, and Books
"One can never had too many librarian friends."
"I stood in the corridor feeling like an angry pebble. It didn't matter where I rolled off to. The mystery and treachery of the world continued, and a pebble like me could get angry over anything it liked and it wouldn't do any good. Librarians not reading, I thought to myself. Sometimes I don't know why I bother."
Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
"The world is full of disappointment," I said."Yes," she said, "I heard him say that. And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?""No," I said. "There's more than that.""Like what?""Like good books," I said, "and good people. And good librarians, who are almost both at once."
Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
"The better the school library, the higher the reading scores."
"The Librarians control the information... They control what gets read, what gets seen, and what gets learned. Because of that they have power."
"Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors."
"Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)"
"It is possible that librarians will be robots, controlled by Master Minds having mastery of a master computer at the Library of Congress.Or there will be no libraries and librarians, flesh-and-blood or otherwise. The onetime library patron will press a button and turn a dial on his TV, whereupon the requested book, in the desired language, will appear on the screen, the pages turning at the designated speed."
"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."
"...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her."
"All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need"
"He would not object, he said, to accepting a post as a librarian. But as Cecilia was unable to imagine that her father or her brother would feel any marked degree of satisfaction in giving her in marriage to a librarian, this very handsome concession on Mr Fawnhope's part merely added to her despondency."
"...maybe you can curb your bibliophile tendencies for the moment? It's not like we don't have other...priorities....at present.""Nonsense," the bookseller said. "There's always time to appreciate a good book."
"We have the librarians on our side. We have *justice* on our side."
"Some are born to greatness; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them.' It is in this way that the librarian has become a censor of literature... books that distinctly commend what is wrong, that teach how to sin and how pleasant sin is, sometimes with and sometimes without the added sauce of impropriety, are increasingly popular, tempting to the author to imitate them, the publishers to produce, the bookseller to exploit. Thank heaven they do not tempt the librarian."
"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."
"And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild."
"Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made."
"The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective."
"It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar."
"We don’t have to destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift."
"I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace."
Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
"To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of thepast and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. Iwas motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others."
"Do you ever hide books you've read over and over again because you're so sick of them?''Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they saw one of the books at the library, so now they think the librarians are book fairies."
Gina Sheridan, I Work at a Public Library: A Collection of Crazy Stories from the Stacks
"Blaming the library for exposure to pornography is like blaming the lake if your child walks up to it alone, falls in and then drowns. – David Sawyer, Spokesman-Review, 18 December 2000"
"I deserve a swift kick in the shorts for all the times I’ve stubbornly wound my way through the library stacks, my mule head leading the way, searching fruitlessly for information a librarian could put in my hands in a matter of minutes. – Michael Perry, Handbook for Freelance Writing"
"When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian."
"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim."
"Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader."
"Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever e-book lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario."
"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."
Peter Morville, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
"I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything."
"Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell."
"I have always thought that librarians are a little bit like doctors, travel agents and professors all rolled into one. We all know that a great story can lift spirits, take you anywhere in the world you want to go and in any time period to boot, and the lessons you learn from a good book can buoy your own convictions and even change your life."
"[I]n spite of her work as a reference librarian, she discovered that life isn't about knowing all the answers. The best we can do is make peace with our questions, learn who we are, know our strengths, and do the best we can with the gifts we've been given while we're here."
"Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy."
Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
"Twas a cold Yuletide evening, and I wandered the stacks, shelving multiple titles that the patrons brought back. We toiled overtime at our library here, 'cause the powers that be cut our staffing this year."
"That night, Hallie was relieved when Linda Soares, the town librarian who'd spent years trying to impress Nick with her low-cut shirts and book recommendations, joined them for dinner."
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