#librarian

They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves. ↗

— Marilyn Johnson

#men

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 ↗

— Miles Harvey

#genius #librarian #titles #men

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others. ↗

— Scott Douglas

#library #library-books #quiet-please #motivational

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim. ↗

— Linton Weeks

#libraries #washington-post #information

But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. ↗

— Zoë Heller

#loneliness #writers #librarians

Books are only half our job ; the other half is human nature. ↗

— Mary Virginia Provines

#human-nature #job #librarians #library #people

She's right, of course. My mother usually is. She's a librarian. ↗

— Heather Vogel Frederick

#much-ado-about-anne #librarians

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. ↗

— Robert Musil

#library #perspective

[Librarians] are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. ↗

— Michael Moore

#librarians #revolution

...killing rats wasn’t in my job description. ↗

— Scott Douglas

#library #quiet-please #description