Overdue Quotes

“We want, and need institutions that embody hope—now more than ever. Public libraries, maybe above all else, have a long history of providing just that.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“May libraries shine their light as unending reminders of who we have been and who we might be.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“However many outside forces fragment us or pull us from our most inherent senses of ourselves and each other, from our senses of place, and the natural world, we remain deeply connected. And we remain, too, deeply capable of using that connection to change things for not just ourselves, but for each other.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I can envision a future where libraries are one of many institutions leading the way toward communal compassion. Where libraries are still needed, but not essential to so many people for basic care and survival. A future where more people understand the many ways we - all of us - need each other. Where people advocate for more library-like services in their communities.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I can imagine a future where people engage through lenses of curiosity and empathy, not revenge or anger or dominance.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I do not believe a voiceless person exists - only people who are ignored or otherwise silenced.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“When we look harder at the cracks in our society, we can also begin to see the resilience and resistance. We can begin to see an embodied call, and a demand, for care. In seeing what is broken, we can see all that is not broken too.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Fear is an access point to hope if we approach it correctly.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The actual light that libraries provide comes not just from the books and resources and shared resources but from the people within them and the stories they carry - both the library workers and the patrons. That light beams that we can care for others more justly, equally and empathetically. That we can do so much without tying it to capitalism, to profit and commodity. That we might all have a willingness to bolster and create shared free spaces, customs, and broadly accepted societal beliefs that we all have inherent rights as human beings. Hope for a more holistic, transparent, forgiving and supportive communal world.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Social media is made and used for reaction, for opinion, for emotional validation, and ultimately for profit. Users are pulled in, again and again, by its allure.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“We have to collect the pulse of the topic. Only after that can we begin to truly make assessments, to analyze and synthesize what we have taken in. The very last step in the process, not the reactionary first, is to insert our metaphorical oar.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“I sometimes spent hours reading pages from the thesaurus and dictionary for fun, forgetting the television altogether. I can't imagine how different I would be now if I had not been free and encouraged to seek answers in these ways, without external judgement or data tracking.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Anyone can learn to think a little bit more like a librarian when it comes to not just research and information assessment, but also empathy and community care. Anyone can participate in this reckoning and think critically and imaginatively about how we might move forward.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“It is entirely impossible for the singular institution of the public library to "save" us. This notion is rooted not just in incomplete information, but in a willful ignorance.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“There is a reason that libraries have existed in some form as far back as the seventh century BC and that philosophers, historians, monarchs, peasants, and any other category of human beings we have created have turned to them for guidance, entertainment, and a sense of place in the world. They provide answers. They provide history. They mark our humanness, our present, our past, our future.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“It is essentially second responders who pick up the pieces after the initial shattering. And though it's probably not the first profession to come to mind, librarians often play the role of both first and second responder in their work, not just second responder.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“When you are struggling to meet basic needs, there is little to no time to consider why and how your life circumstances might be different.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The American public library is a case study for American society: what we value and uphold, what we resist and weave stories around, whom we give certain access to and whom we deny it.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“And yet, however much mistakes provide information to make better decisions, this only happens deeply when we pause and allow space for our relationship to them to grow beyond just our emotional ties to them. Not everyone is allotted that time.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Mistakes had only ever been about feelings, and those feelings were generally ones that were hard to face. Shame, vulnerability, guilt, frustration, anger. Framing them on a cognitive level as information, not just emotions, changed my relationship to them.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“But everything, absolutely all the library work, had also been data. Collectible information that could be assessed and analyzed, that inferences could be made from. Some might argue that information and data, numbers and charts and statistics, aren't concerned with what feels "good" or "bad" (or any number of things in between), but I disagree. All data is tied back to emotions - to some original question, concern, desire, hypothesis that can be traced back to the feelings of a researcher, or a scientist, or whoever formed a hypothesis, asked a question, became interested in measuring something, tried to solve a problem, or cure a virus, and so forth.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“My daily focus slowly shifted from care of others to care of self.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“In my practiced interpretation of the word empathy, I tried, always, to respond to others with some understanding of who they were as a human being with unique experiences and perspectives that I could never fully understand.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Any sort of fundamental and systemic change that develops within libraries and extends out to the communities they serve depends on this, more than anything that individual librarians can do on their own.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“My relief was immense, but so were my guilt, anger, and confusion. I was glad to no longer have so much enforcement and surveillance be my responsibility, but I was also disturbed that this monitoring was now being done by someone who carried a gun.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“The more questions I had, the more it felt like there was an empty black void I was asking them into. I had no idea how wide or deep it went and was beginning to not want to find out. I didn't feel like yelling and not being heard anymore.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“You would be hard pressed to enter a library anywhere in the United States that does not have marginalized and vulnerable groups who regularly patronize it. You need only ask the librarians who work there for confirmation. Unless you don't want to hear it. Unless you want to ignore it, place the onus on the employees, and keep supporting systems that push marginalized groups farther and farther away, to some new town or city, to some new library, as so many library administrators do, unconsciously and consciously.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Social norms exist on a spectrum.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“Who heard them? Who valued their words? How had they tried to communicate?”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

“And it should be common knowledge that the three largest public mental health providers in America are correctional systems: Los Angeles County, Rikers Island in New York, and Cook County in Illinois.”
― Amanda Oliver, Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library