This Book Is Overdue! Quotes

“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.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“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.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the PhD.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Bibliomancy: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They 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.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Yes, librarians use punctuation marks to make little emoticons, smiley and frowny faces in their correspondence, but if there were one for an ironic wink, or a sarcastic lip curl, they'd wear it out.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“They seemed to be quiet types, the women and men in rubber-soled shoes. Their favorite word, after literacy, was privacy--for their patrons and themselves.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“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.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“In tight economic times, with libraries sliding farther and farther down the list of priorities, we risk the loss of their ideals, intelligence, and knowledge, not to mention their commitment to access for all—librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy, and they’re right. Librarians are essential players in the information revolution because they level that field. They enable those without money or education to read and learn the same things as the billionaire and the Ph.D…In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Members of the Order take vows of literacy, obstinancy and bibliomancy. Bibliomancy? It's defined for us a little further down: "Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are.

They’re sorting it all out for us.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Librarians' values are as sound as Girl Scouts': truth, free speech, and universal literacy. And, like Scouts, they possess a quality that I think makes librarians invaluable and indispensable: they want to help. They want to help us. They want to be of service. And they're not trying to sell us anything.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Bibliomancy? It’s defined for us a little further down: “Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“… one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, “[...] the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity…There’s a subversive element to librarianship that I adore.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“(Someday, I will stop being surprised at all the things librarians read; they’ll read anything.)”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her again patrons read as children - and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast - or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress’s map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps… Whether the subject was a community librarian or a prophet, almost every librarian obituary contained some version of this sentence: “Under [their] watch, the library changed from a collection of books into an automated research center.” I began to get the idea that libraries were where it was happening - wide open territory for innovators, activists, and pioneers.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn’t help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“So when I hear this snarky question (and I hear it everywhere): Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google? all I can say is, are you kidding? Librarians are more important than ever. Google and Yahoo! and Bing and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children—and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast—or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization... Why we do things will not change, but how we will do them will... If the Library is to fulfill its purpose in the future, librarians must commit to a culture of continuous operational change, accept risk and uncertainty as key properties of the profession, and uphold service to the user as our most valuable directive.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“I understood—I thought I understood—then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata—I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All