Marilyn Johnson Quotes

#1. One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts - who can say when that will come in handy?

Marilyn Johnson

#2. Libraries have always been there for me. Of course I'll stand up for them.

Marilyn Johnson

#3. Never camp by the edge of a waterhole"; "don't screw with hippos"; "baboons are like German shepherds on crack";

Marilyn Johnson

#4. We settled in a booth at Bishop's 4th Street Diner, an aging silver zeppelin on the rotary outside the naval base, grungy and stuffed with Betty Boop tchotchkes in the windows. The waitress greeted Abbass familiarly and promptly took her order: a hamburger, rare, and fries.

Marilyn Johnson

#5. There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

Marilyn Johnson

#6. 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

#7. I didn't have the vocabulary to ask Google what it knew, or maybe I didn't have the vision.

Marilyn Johnson

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. The vast waterfall of history pours down, and a few obituarists fill teacups with the stories.

Marilyn Johnson

#11. Seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples.

Marilyn Johnson

#12. Of course. Ask your librarian. Always the right answer.

Marilyn Johnson

#13. It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.

Marilyn Johnson

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. In tough times, a librarian is a terrible thing to waste.

Marilyn Johnson

#18. 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

#19. One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession," one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and 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

#20. Place is not the background of archaeology - it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.

Marilyn Johnson

#21. 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

#22. Librarians consider free access to information the foundation of democracy.

Marilyn Johnson

#23. It's almost impossible to teach that sort of writing except by pointing students to a stack of clips and telling them, 'Inhale these.

Marilyn Johnson

#24. Who knows how many people are invisible because their stories don't fit our categories?

Marilyn Johnson

#25. Bibliomancy: Divination by jolly well Looking It Up.

Marilyn Johnson

#26. Bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).

Marilyn Johnson

#27. 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

#28. When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts,

Marilyn Johnson