Marilyn Johnson > Quotes

“Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Bibliomancy: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“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

“Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“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, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all—librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and they’re right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D…In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.”
― Marilyn Johnson

“Maybe it begins the day you pledge allegiance,
face the flag and suddenly clutch your left clavicle
because you find a tender puff of breast
where yesterday your heart was

Or maybe it happens later when you're walking home
from school and they rush you on the street--
those boys who reach out fast, disgrace your blouse
with rubs of dirt, their laughter
stinging hot against your face.
And you bite your rage, swallow your tears
because the fact is, your territory's up for grabs
and somehow it's your own damned fault.

And one day you stand at your mirror
armed with jars and razor blades against the scents
and grasses of your shameless bleeding body,
and you see what you've become--a freak
manufactured to disguise the real one,
the one who sometimes still recalls your innocence,
the time before you became a dirty joke.

And maybe it begins to end the day
you try against the odds to love yourself again.
Even though you know the worst thing
you can call someone is cunt,
you try to love the flesh and fur you are,
that convoluted, prehistoric flower,
petals dripping weeds and echoing
vaguely fragrant odors of the sea.”
― Marilyn Johnson

“Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“It’s almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.”
― Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

“So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are.

They’re sorting it all out for us.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“One graduate student told me, “When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts,” and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts—who can say when that will come in handy?”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“… one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, “[...] 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.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“(Someday, I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they’ll read anything.)”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, “flinging shit everywhere”—and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. “Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought,” Shea riffed. “If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you’d go with heidelbergensis.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her again patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps… Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under [their] watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening - wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Bibliomancy? It’s defined for us a little further down: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All