#librarian

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113 ↗

— Miles Harvey

#genius #librarian #titles #men

She's right, of course. My mother usually is. She's a librarian. ↗

— Heather Vogel Frederick

#much-ado-about-anne #librarians

The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective. ↗

— Robert Musil

#library #perspective

...killing rats wasn’t in my job description. ↗

— Scott Douglas

#library #quiet-please #description

As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her. ↗

— Erma Bombeck

#librarians

Mr. Powell raised an eyebrow. 'I'm a librarian,' he said. 'I always know what I'm talking about. ↗

— Gary D. Schmidt

#librarians

Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink. ↗

— Barbara Pym

#librarians

She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged. ↗

— Gary Paulsen

#libraries #librarians

To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand. ↗

— Jane Langton

#librarians

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

#libraries #library #librarians