Marie Hviding

“librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets — 'Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading' — to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity read. 'The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you're afraid she'll catch it,' she wrote in one of her tip sheets. 'Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books. Destroying those books is a way of saying that the culture itself no longer exists; its history has disappeared; the continuity between its past and its future is ruptured. Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce