Ian Sansom > Quotes

“[L]ibrarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with mental health disorders, can make people nervous.”
― Ian Sansom

“Children are bad enough--children are rude, selfish, greedy, and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol, and power.”
― Ian Sansom

“Those who can, do; those who can't learn classification and cataloguing.”
― Ian Sansom, The Book Stops Here

“But then twitching nervously in the presence of a librarian wasn't an uncommon response—librarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with serious mental health disorders, can make people nervous. Librarians possess a kind of occult power, an aura. They could silence people with just a glance. At least, they did in Israel's fantasies. In Israel's fantasies, librarians were mild-mannered superheroes, with extrasensory perceptions and a highly developed sense of responsibility who demanded respect from everyone they met. In reality, Israel couldn't silence even Mrs Onions on her mobile phone when she was disturbing other readers.”
― Ian Sansom, The Book Stops Here

“Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56”
― Ian Sansom, Paper: An Elegy

“They were always there for you, books, like a small pet dog that doesn't die.”
― Ian sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not.”
― Ian Sansom, Mr. Dixon Disappears

“Good luck is a skill, and bad luck simply the product of poor choices and overlooked opportunities. In other words, tough luck.”
― Ian Sansom, Essex Poison

“Israel was thinking of warm beer, and muffins, and Wensleydale cheese, and Wallace and Gromit, and the music of Elgar, and the Clash, and the Beatles, and Jarvis Cocker, and the white cliffs of Dover, and Big Bend, and the West End, and Stonehenge, and Alton Towers, and the Last Night of the Proms, and Glastonbury, and William Hogarth, and William Blake, and Just William, and Winston Churchill, and the North Circular Road, and Grodzinski's for coffee, and rubbish, and potholes, and a slice of Stilton and a pickled onion, and George Orwell. And Gloria, of course. He was almost home to Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A.”
― Ian Sansom, The Book Stops Here

“Everyone loved a good reader. And he'd always loved being a great reader - until recently. Maybe it was just part of getting older, or maybe it was being a librarian, or just being here, but lately he'd found he was becoming suspicious of his own love of books. All that reading - it had started to seem wrong, worthless almost, without purpose.”
― Ian Sansom, Mr. Dixon Disappears

“All we’re trying to do here is to make our own little piece of heaven.”
― Ian Sansom, Essex Poison

“There is a terrible poignancy about a building intended for the public that is closed to the public: it feels like an insult, a riposte to all our more generous instincts, the public polity under threat, and democracy abandoned”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“We English do not often trouble ourselves with foreign languages. It’s like homosexuality. Something we know about, but don’t care to participate in ourselves. Though some slight sprinkling of knowledge does perhaps come in handy.”
― Ian Sansom, The Norfolk Mystery

“the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing,”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“He was sick of the excuses and the lies. He was tired of the evasions and the untruths, of people refusing to stand up and speak the truth and take responsibility for their own actions. It seemed to him like yet another symptom of the decline of Western civilization; of chaos; and climate change; and environmental disaster; and war; disease; famine; oppression; the eternal slow slide down and down and down. It was entropy, nemesis, apotheosis, imminent apocalypse, and sheer bad manners all rolled into one.

People were not returning their library books on time.”
― Ian Sansom, Mr. Dixon Disappears

“He’d read far too many books, that was Israel’s trouble.
Books had spoilt him; they had curdled his brain, like cream left out on a summer’s afternoon, or eggs overbeaten with butter. He’d been a bookish child, right from the off, the youngest of four, the kind of child who seemed to start reading without anyone realising or noticing, who enjoyed books without his parents’ insistence, who raced through non-fiction at an early age and an extraordinary rate, who read Jack Kerouac before he was in his teens, and who by the age of sixteen had covered most of the great French and Russian authors, and who as a result had matured into an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive soul, full of dreams and ideas, a wide-ranging vocabulary, and just about no earthly good to anyone.
His expectations were sky-high, and his grasp of reality was minimal.”
― Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

“I think it’s about time that women spoke out about their real lives, rather than pretending all the time to be second-rate men”
― Ian Sansom, Essex Poison

“The key to all human interaction, Morley often advised me, is simply to ask others about themselves. Nothing else matters- and everything then follows.”
― Ian Sansom, Essex Poison

“Bird’s Custard Powder.”
― Ian Sansom, The Norfolk Mystery