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.

The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.

In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them!

Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.

There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

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.

This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.

Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.

Religion imprisons God. By its own accord, if we are made in the image and likeness of God, then His condemnation of the sinner is an act of hypocrisy. I believe God to be greater than that.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

I was the third one in my family born, and there are three notes in a chord, so that's how they came up with my name.

I think money is important for everyone, because the lack of it is so painful.

It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

I didn't rebel in the way a lot of people do.

I know that I will not die until my time comes.

I'm always interested in finding new aesthetic problems to deal with and challenge myself, even if the aesthetic problem is one of content.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.