Quotes by Librarians

The longer you remain in Rome,' said [Cardinal] S.C., ‘the smaller you will find it.
Giacomo Casanova
...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)
Georges Bataille
He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned.
Audre Lorde
I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
...our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we are hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb.
William Badke
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family friends and society are the natural enemies of a writer. He must be alone uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Laurence Clark Powell
Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Audre Lorde
You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel Boorstin
Happy are those lovers who when their senses require rest can fall back upon the intellectual enjoyments afforded by the mind! Sweet sleep then comes and lasts until the body has recovered its general harmony. On awaking the senses are again active and always ready to resume their action.
Giacomo Casanova
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Audre Lorde
You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel Boorstin
Happy are those lovers who when their senses require rest can fall back upon the intellectual enjoyments afforded by the mind! Sweet sleep then comes and lasts until the body has recovered its general harmony. On awaking the senses are again active and always ready to resume their action.
Giacomo Casanova
While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Audre Lorde
We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge.
Rutherford D. Rogers
A good man never dies.
Callimachus
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Daniel Boorstin
Love is a great poet its resources are inexhaustible but if the end it has in view is not obtained it feels weary and remains silent.
Giacomo Casanova
Our Thoughts Determine Our Happiness High above hate I dwell 0 storms! Farewell.
Louise Imogen Guiney
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act write speak be I'll be sending messages on a ouija board cryptic complaints from the other side.
Audre Lorde
Hatred is a death wish for the hated not a life wish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
I became more courageous by doing the very things I needed to be courageous for-first a little and badly. Then bit by bit more and better. Being avidly-sometimes annoy-ingly-curious and persistent about discovering how others were doing what I wanted to do.
Audre Lorde
The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.
Josh Hanagarne
That the public library is a part of the educational system should never be lost sight of in the work of establishing it, or in its management. To the great mass of the people it comes as their first and only educational opportunity.
John Cotton Dana
Information is valuable. Librarians and libraries are, at best incidental; at worst, in the way.
Donald A. Barclay
If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future.
James H. Billington
Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.
S.R. Ranganathan
A great library doesn't have to be big or beautiful. It doesn't have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and always has what people need.
Vicki Myron
She gathered a circle of children around her and commenced singing 'For Those Who Peril on the Sea' over their little heads. But no, 'safety from storms' wasn't enough for her. God had to keep them from being blown up too. She set about ordering the poor things to pray for their parents every night- who knew what the German soldiers might do to them? Then she said to be especially good little boys and girls so Mama and Daddy could look down on them from heaven and BE PROUD OF THEM...she had those children crying and sobbing fit to die.I was too shocked to move, but no, not Elizabeth. No, quick as an adder's tongue, she had ahold of Adelaide's arm and told her to SHUT UP.'Let me go!' Adelaide cried. 'I am speaking the Word of God!'Elizabeth, she got a look on her that would turn the devil to stone, and then she slapped Adelaide right across the face!
Mary Ann Shaffer
Love is a word, another kind of open.As the diamond comesinto a knot of flameI am Blackbecause I come from the earth's insidetake my word for jewelin the open light.
Audre Lorde
Such days of autumnal decline hold a strange mystery which adds to the gravity of all our moods.
Charles Nodier
She was talking to a tree. Just talking to a tree. Totally normal. People probably did it every day here. They're only trees. She fought an insane urge to laugh.
Ruth Frances Long
An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness of the pre-BaroqueHardly involves the eye, untilIt meets his left-hand gauntlett, stillClasped empty in the other, andOne sees with a sharp tender shockHis hand withdrawn, holding her hand.They would not think to lie so long,Such faithfulness in effigyWas just a detail friends would see,A sculptor's sweet commissioned graceThrown off in helping to prolongThe Latin names around the base.They would not guess how early inTheir supine stationary voyageThe air would change to soundless damage,Turn the old tenantry away;How soon succeeding eyes beingTo look, not read. Rigidly, theyPersisted, linked, through lengths and breadthsOf time. Snow fell, undated. LightEach summer thronged the grass. A brightLitter of birdcalls strewed the sameBone-littered ground. And up the pathsThe endless altered people cameWashing at their identity.Now helpless in the hollowOf an unarmorial age, a troughOf smoke in slow suspended skeinsAbove their scrap of history,Only an attitude remains.Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon and to proveOur almost-instinct almost-true:What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
Every race proves a new opportunity to educate myself about what it means to be a runner and what it means to run.
Jill Grunenwald
Step my step, mile by mile. These were my medals and I had worked hard for each and every one of them and no matter what happened, no matter who horrible I felt on race day, those medals represent the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making me the runner I am today.
Jill Grunenwald
This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)
Audre Lorde
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
Audre Lorde
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Audre Lorde
You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.
Audre Lorde
MCMXIVThose long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;And the shut shops, the bleachedEstablished names on the sunblinds,The farthings and sovereigns,And dark-clothed children at playCalled after kings and queens,The tin advertisementsFor cocoa and twist, and the pubsWide open all day--And the countryside not caring:The place names all hazed overWith flowering grasses, and fieldsShadowing Domesday linesUnder wheat's restless silence;The differently-dressed servantsWith tiny rooms in huge houses,The dust behind limousines;Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.
Philip Larkin
I kept trying to explain and he kept shouting until I began to cry from frustration. Then he felt remorseful, which was so unlike him and endearing that I almost changed my mind and said yes. But then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.
Mary Ann Shaffer
Once more Jane sat staring at the telephone. This time she was filled with a confidence that was new to her. Stan Crandall. Stanley Crandall. He liked her! He had seen her once, and even though had been rumpled and grass-stained and having a terrible time with Sandra, he liked her well enough to go to the trouble of finding out her name and calling to ask her to go to the movies. Jane smiled at the telephone and gave a sigh of happiness
Beverly Cleary
Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
Audre Lorde
Everything can't be explained by some general biological phrase.
Nella Larsen
All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.
Mary Ann Shaffer
MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows        Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, de
Philip Larkin
It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our one's hypocrisies at the top of one's voice, thick skinned as a rhino. At least I do.
Philip Larkin
But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I suppose most things in a person's life are good for a while, even if that doesn't last very long. Maybe that is why, even after something has gone wrong, we spend so much time trying to fix it. Because we remember when it wasn't broken.
Claire Legrand
Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
Audre Lorde
Love becomes imprudent only when it is impatient to enjoy; but when it is a matter of procuring the return of a happiness to which a baleful combination of circumstances has raised impediments, love sees and foresees all that the most subtle perspicacity can discover.
Giacomo Casanova
Dark-bright fire lit eyes
Audre Lorde
Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Mary Ann Shaffer
I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.'Librarian: 'Okay.''--'Librarian: '--''--'Librarian: 'Enjoy your day!
Gina Sheridan
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
Note found in the patron suggestion box:"You have SIGNS up near the computers that say BE QUIET, but people don't be quiet. They laugh out loud and talk out loud. Libraries used to be quiet, but they aren't anymore because you let all the assholes in!!!!!
Gina Sheridan