Librarian Quotes

A school library is like the Bat Cave: it's a safe fortress in a chaotic world, a source of knowledge and the lair of a superhero. True, the superhero is more likely to be wearing a cardigan than a batsuit, but still...

The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public... Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

My ultimate authority would be the school librarian Mrs. Greenbacher.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

Big fat hairy monkey, hands a couple of octaves wide?

She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.

Believe it or not working in libraries is very similar to working on an ambulance or a fire truck. You take care of a lot of homeless people, you sometimes have to clean up things that require latex gloves, you always wear comfortable shoes, and you put out a lot of “fires”!

She remembered the conversation in the Library, as forgetting was the last thing a fully-trained Librarian should do. Memories were as important as books, and almost as important as proper indexing.

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113

With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua’s hands. “One of my favorites.

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

Librarian: taking the E.T. out of Libertarian.

If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.

Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

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.

Break the spine of one of my books and I break yours.

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.

Librarians have always been among the most thoughtful and helpful people. They are teachers without a classroom. No libraries, no progress.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

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 element to librarianship that I adore.

As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the page in little puffs when you're reading something or looking at some pictures, kind of hypnotizing smell.I think it's the smell that makes so many folks fall asleep in the library. You'll see someone turn a page and you can imagine a puff of page powder coming up real slow and easy until it starts piling on a person's eyelashes, weighing their eyes down so much they stay down a little longer after each blink and finally making them so heavy that they just don't come back up at all. Then their mouths open and their heads start bouncing up and down like they're bobbing in a big tub of of water for apples and before you know it... they're out cold and their face thunks smack-dab on the book.That's the part that makes librarians the maddest. They get real upset if folks start drooling in the books

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

I am not the kind of girl who trusts a man to tell her everything she needs to know in his own due time, so I did some research on my sire. You can take the girl out of the library, but you can't take the neurotic, compulsively curious librarian out of the girl.

It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.

It took me awhile to learn the rules. OK, it took the librarian in me weeks of careful obsessive research to learn the rules. There was a label maker involved. I'd rather not go into it.

. . . when a woman has a husbandAnd you've got none,Why should she take advice from you?Even if you can quote Balzac and ShakespeareAnd all them other highfalutin' Greeks.

If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

She'd always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be -- she was a librarian, after all.

They spent pork-barrel money like a tidal-wave sea, but no funds trickled down far enough to reach me. Our books numbered few and were falling apart, and I sat mending pages with a crestfallen heart.