The Archivist Quotes

“In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. ”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“Librarians, too, are gatekeepers -- not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew -- in the incontestable way that children know things -- that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.

Between people it is less clear what is owed. Yet perhaps what is love is really an empathetic and hungry imagination. One must be willing to enter other stories -- even terrifying or dangerous ones, or those of uncertain outcomes.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“The great librarians have all been religious men--monks, priests, rabbis-- and the stewardship of books is an act of homage and faith.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“I keep telling him that whatever secrets I contain are nothing compared to the average German’s secrets. Just what was that smell carried south from Sachsenhausen into the village? Somebody had a father, mother, sister, brother who looked the other way. What are my secrets as against theirs?”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“A certain kind of hunger. To know what happened and at least ask why. Because the tikkun can’t start until everyone asks what happened — not just the Jews but everybody.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“Christianity, Judith answered, is a lie of consolation. There’s no consolation for what we’ve already lost — all of us …”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“The doctors at Hayden may have erred about the details of her condition. They need their labels, their certainties. What are depression and psychosis, after all, but lapses from realism? And what’s that? But the doctors were right about the general crisis. An insufficient God is better than no God at all.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist