Top 200 Susan Orlean Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.”

— Susan Orlean

2. “Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn’t know.”

— Susan Orlean

3. “I am of mixed minds about the issue of privacy. On one hand, I understand that information is power, and power is, well, power, so keeping your private information to yourself is essential – especially if you are a controversial figure, a celebrity, or a dissident.”

— Susan Orlean

4. “I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.”

— Susan Orlean

5. “I would like to make sleeping my new hobby, except that I’m too tired, really, to have a hobby. But a girl can always dream.”

— Susan Orlean

6. “I think coexisting with another life form is a very rich experience. It’s why people keep plants and animals.”

— Susan Orlean

7. “I wish I had coined the phrase ‘tyranny of choice,’ but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.”

— Susan Orlean

8. “I didn’t want to talk, and I didn’t think dogs could solve my problems. But they were so uncritical and un-judgmental. Sometimes when you’re really blue, you don’t want to talk, but you want that sense of companionship. I certainly enjoy that with my beasts.”

— Susan Orlean

9. “I heard a computer scientist the other day refer to playing with the Kinect as ‘storytelling.’ At first I thought that sounded a little high-minded, but after trying a few games I could see what she meant.”

— Susan Orlean

10. “Like writing, running is so much about mind over matter. There are times when you have to override the discomfort and keep pushing. That capacity to endure and then prevail is just amazing.”

— Susan Orlean

11. “I don’t like hiking with convicts carrying machetes.”

— Susan Orlean

12. “I rarely listen to commercial radio, and when I do, I’m shocked by how many ads there are, and how annoying they are, and how bad the radio station usually is.”

— Susan Orlean

13. “In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

— Susan Orlean

14. “Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things – the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.”

— Susan Orlean

15. “If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger?”

— Susan Orlean

16. “I suppose I do have one embarrassing passion- I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.”

— Susan Orlean

17. “Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”

— Susan Orlean

18. “There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don’t think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still – why is it so hard to throw them away?”

— Susan Orlean

19. “When my son was born, and after a day of lying-in I was told that I could leave the hospital and take him home, I burst into tears. It wasn’t the emotion of the moment: it was shock and horror.”

— Susan Orlean

20. “In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned.”

— Susan Orlean

21. “A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.”

— Susan Orlean

22. “I’m happy to be reminded that an ordinary day full of nothing but nothingness can make you feel like you’ve won the lottery.”

— Susan Orlean

23. “The library is a prerequisite to let citizens make use of their right to information and freedom of speech. Free access to information is necessary in a democratic society, for open debate and creation of public opinion.”

— Susan Orlean

24. “Libraries are physical spaces belonging to a community where we gather to share information. There isn’t anywhere else that fits that description.”

— Susan Orlean

25. “I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.”

— Susan Orlean

26. “Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida.”

— Susan Orlean

27. “People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises – the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

— Susan Orlean

28. “Sometimes, the Internet can feel like a middle-school playground populated by brats in ski masks who name-call and taunt with the fake bravery of the anonymous. But sometimes – thank goodness – it’s nicer than real life.”

— Susan Orlean

29. “In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel – in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning.”

— Susan Orlean

30. “Animals can seem more pure. Without complication, I mean, animals are selfless. What animals do for us, they do out of instinct.”

— Susan Orlean

31. “I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as much as he loves it, he swoons at the idea of a free day arriving unexpectedly, laid out like a gift.”

— Susan Orlean

32. “Sometimes it’s harder to notice a place you think you know well; you eyes glide over it, seeing it but not seeing it at all. It’s almost as if familiarity gives you a kind of temporary blindness. I had to force myself to look harder and try to see beyond the concept of library that was so latent in my brain.”

— Susan Orlean

33. “One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.”

— Susan Orlean

34. “I would argue that it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear.”

— Susan Orlean

35. “It is hard to imagine Thomas Kinkade as anything less than supremely self-assured.”

— Susan Orlean

36. “I am unusually Halloween-attentive, because, as it happens, I was born on Halloween, so for me it has always been an occasion of great moment.”

— Susan Orlean

37. “The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

— Susan Orlean

38. “In times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries.”

— Susan Orlean

39. “It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries – and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up – not just stopped but saved.”

— Susan Orlean

40. “I was never any good at remembering dates, but now I hardly have to. When the first bulb catalogs get delivered and the hens start laying again, that’s all the notice I’ll need to know that winter has passed.”

— Susan Orlean

41. “I feel somewhat responsible for the Borders Books bankruptcy.”

— Susan Orlean

42. “Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.”

— Susan Orlean

43. “Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.”

— Susan Orlean

44. “In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.”

— Susan Orlean

45. “I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication.”

— Susan Orlean

46. “In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.”

— Susan Orlean

47. “The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.”

— Susan Orlean

48. “Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.”

— Susan Orlean

49. “The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired.”

— Susan Orlean

50. “Dogs really are perfect soldiers. They are brave and smart; they can smell through walls, see in the dark, and eat Army rations without complaint.”

— Susan Orlean