I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. The would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

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

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

Good librarians are natural intelligence operatives. They possess all of the skills and characteristics required for that work: curiosity, wide-ranging knowledge, good memories, organization and analytical aptitude, and discretion.

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.