Amanda Oliver > Quotes

“We want, and need institutions that embody hope—now more than ever. Public libraries, maybe above all else, have a long history of providing just that.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The library was more than my favorite place: it was my first beloved destination, first embodied center, and it was absolutely sacred.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“What I could do was be kind and try to develop their curiosities and interests. I could create a safe and loving space, surrounded by books, and mostly I succeeded, though I am certain my own implicit biases and naivete, impacted how I showed up to the community. I did my best with what I had, how and where I had been raised, and who I had become as an adult.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I learned to equate activism with "giving to others" early on. If you didn't have money to give, you gave your kindness, energy, and time. If you did have any "extra" money, you were encouraged to give it.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“There is a reason that libraries have existed in some form as far back as the seventh century BC and that philosophers, historians, monarchs, peasants, and any other category of human beings we have created have turned to them for guidance, entertainment, and a sense of place in the world. They provide answers. They provide history. They mark our humanness, our present, our past, our future.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Mistakes had only ever been about feelings, and those feelings were generally ones that were hard to face. Shame, vulnerability, guilt, frustration, anger. Framing them on a cognitive level as information, not just emotions, changed my relationship to them.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Our country has long equated money with intelligence, power, and strength, and poverty with weakness, incompetence, and mediocrity. And yet folks in "lower" socioeconomic groups have deep-rooted resourcefulness, cleverness, empathy, loyalty, and quick-thinking skills that wealthier people don't have the same need to develop to survive. While these skills are enviable and valuable ones, especially as our world shifts to a need for more resourcefulness, ingenuity, and physical labor, they often develop from immense struggle. Wealthy people develop them differently, in more controlled and comfortable ways; through higher education, wellness classes, TED Talks, and similar. They do this in the comfort of their own spaces, and rarely, if ever, out of any necessity.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Any good inquiry starts with a question, but I also believe that any good inquiry ends on a new question or questions. I've solved this piece, but in that search, I discovered this, which also needs answering. It happens again and again, and I do not find the cycle maddening or inefficient or frustrating. I find it profoundly freeing and a reminder that everything in our world is deeply connected.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“With a White majority continually fulfilling roles in libraries and library leadership, other voices are unavoidably lessened, ignored, and lost.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“We have to collect the pulse of the topic. Only after that can we begin to truly make assessments, to analyze and synthesize what we have taken in. The very last step in the process, not the reactionary first, is to insert our metaphorical oar.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“We treated each other like intelligent and capable individuals who were curious and well intentioned, but also human and fallible. We naturally bounced ideas and thoughts off one another, genuinely seeking each other's thinking, including criticism and pushback. It was this that was essential to our bond: any disagreement came with an unspoken agreement that it did not lessen our views of one another as humans.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I didn't know it then, but this was an additional piece of an overarching question I would spend most of early adulthood trying to answer: how could there be so much inequality?”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I can envision a future where libraries are one of many institutions leading the way toward communal compassion. Where libraries are still needed, but not essential to so many people for basic care and survival. A future where more people understand the many ways we - all of us - need each other. Where people advocate for more library-like services in their communities.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“And yet, however much mistakes provide information to make better decisions, this only happens deeply when we pause and allow space for our relationship to them to grow beyond just our emotional ties to them. Not everyone is allotted that time.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“My daily focus slowly shifted from care of others to care of self.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Kindness is an entry and starting point for change, and it is crucial. But to fully enact and embody the work we need to see in public libraries, kindness is not nearly enough on its own.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“When we look harder at the cracks in our society, we can also begin to see the resilience and resistance. We can begin to see an embodied call, and a demand, for care. In seeing what is broken, we can see all that is not broken too.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Social norms exist on a spectrum.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“This is the gift of an honest reckoning with our past: freedom to move forward, with truth, in truth. However painful it may be, in the collective or individual process, we eventually come to better and more completely understand the world around us and how we might do better.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Anyone can learn to think a little bit more like a librarian when it comes to not just research and information assessment, but also empathy and community care. Anyone can participate in this reckoning and think critically and imaginatively about how we might move forward.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Libraries are sanctuaries for the mind, body, and spirit. They are repositories of language, literature, community care, and human growth. And they are also places of objectification, racism, sexual assault, and other human atrocities. They are embodiments of our history and culture, for better, and also for worse.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I do not believe anyone is homeless, which is to say that so long as people are alive they have a home within themselves, and I recognize that this home may be a precious anchor.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The question of who libraries are for, and who they exclude, should not remain cloaked in half-histories and half-truths.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“At an individual level - when we decide to avoid or lessen the process of seeking broader and more accurate understandings of our history, preferring the ease of a shallow depth over the truth of a deep one - everyone around us is susceptible to our opacity.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“We want, and need, institutions that embody hope - now more than ever. Public libraries, maybe above all else, have a long history of providing just that. And there is deep and resounding hope in libraries and library work. But if that hope expects to grow and evolve, it is essential that a full and accurate story be told.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“My relief was immense, but so were my guilt, anger, and confusion. I was glad to no longer have so much enforcement and surveillance be my responsibility, but I was also disturbed that this monitoring was now being done by someone who carried a gun.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“But everything, absolutely all the library work, had also been data. Collectible information that could be assessed and analyzed, that inferences could be made from. Some might argue that information and data, numbers and charts and statistics, aren't concerned with what feels "good" or "bad" (or any number of things in between), but I disagree. All data is tied back to emotions - to some original question, concern, desire, hypothesis that can be traced back to the feelings of a researcher, or a scientist, or whoever formed a hypothesis, asked a question, became interested in measuring something, tried to solve a problem, or cure a virus, and so forth.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“You would be hard pressed to enter a library anywhere in the United States that does not have marginalized and vulnerable groups who regularly patronize it. You need only ask the librarians who work there for confirmation. Unless you don't want to hear it. Unless you want to ignore it, place the onus on the employees, and keep supporting systems that push marginalized groups farther and farther away, to some new town or city, to some new library, as so many library administrators do, unconsciously and consciously.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I now understand that the identity work gives us is often deeply tied up in a capitalist American culture, and choosing to deeply align with our jobs and job titles as who we are often diminishes or eliminates altogether a meaningful sense of inherent self-worth as human beings. All human beings deserve shelter, food, health care, and safety, regardless of their levels of capitalist productivity.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The current decentralized mental health system has predominantly benefited middle-class people with less severe disorders who are able to reenter their homes and communities more easily. Most people with severe mental health issues still receive inadequate services and have a difficult time integrating into a community where they become even more vulnerable.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library