"The world is quiet here."
— Lemony Snicket

"When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?”"
— Scott Douglas

""It's about the journey--mine and yours--and the lives we can touch, the legacy we can leave, and the world we can change for the better." "
— Tony Dungy

"It took a bit of popcorn and a library snack bar to make me realize that being a librarian was about more than just giving people information. It was about serving a community. And if the community is hungry for more than just knowledge, then maybe it’s about time to open a snack bar."
— Scott Douglas

"I like to imagine that library school was started because of some sort of silly bar bet where a guy got really plastered and told his buddy that he could convince people that librarians needed to be trained in the art of librarianship. Sadly, this is not the case; its roots are a bit more academic."
— Scott Douglas

"The loudest elderly women always had the quietest elderly husbands."
— Scott Douglas

"We don’t have to
destroy the library of the past. We just need to give it a face-lift."
— Scott Douglas (Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian)

"The quieter you become, the more you can hear. "
— Baba Ram Das

"A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books."
— Scott Douglas

"In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone."
— Rollo May

"To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the
past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I
was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others."
— Scott Douglas

"There’s something deep in the heart of every person that wants
to protect culture. The only thing about my pending career that
was changed because of 9/11 was that I began to see it was the community,
not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarians
were only as important as the community they inspired. If I
was going to continue with this career, my job wouldn’t be to protect
information, it would be to bring the community together and
inspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for."
— Scott Douglas

"...killing rats wasn’t in my job description."
— Scott Douglas

"We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds."
— Fitz-James O'Brien (Classic Ghost Stories)

"Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. "
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,
Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst"
— John Ashbery

"Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content, The quiet mind is richer than a crown..."
— Robert Greene

"Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers."
— Ester Buchholz

""There is no such thing as...quiet""
— Lian