Avi Steinberg Quotes

#1. His elegant librarianship ... made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes - to which I was often drawn - but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time.

Avi Steinberg

#2. Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident.

Avi Steinberg

#3. Pimps make the best librarians.

Avi Steinberg

#4. Yet for quixotic reasons
namely, that I enjoyed writing obits
I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.

Avi Steinberg

#5. I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

Avi Steinberg

#6. All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the American public has been making for over thirty years.

Avi Steinberg

#7. Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.

Avi Steinberg