When you make a decision you need facts. If those facts are in your brain, they're at your fingertips. If they're all in Google somewhere you may not make the right decision on the spur of the moment.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

The thing you like/are good at is a sacred thing.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.

Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.