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!

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

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.

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

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'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.