“People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. I knew I would be a librarian in college as a student assistant at a reference desk, watching those lovely people at work. ‘I don’t think there’s such a book—’ a patron would begin, and then the librarian would hand it to them, that very book.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“…e-books don’t wear out. Programming them to self-destruct after 26 checkouts is tantamount to asking librarians to embrace entropy. Anyone who thinks that this is going to happen has never spent any time with a librarian.”

Cory Doctorow

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