Top 200 Susan Orlean Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does – I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.”

— Susan Orlean

52. “I’ve used Twitter now and again to try to figure something out; it’s an amazing resource. But I think you have to use it judiciously: it’s a self-selected group, so it’s important not to start thinking of it as the whole world.”

— Susan Orlean

53. “You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.”

— Susan Orlean

54. “Now we’re e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.”

— Susan Orlean

55. “The biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk.”

— Susan Orlean

56. “I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom – a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training – but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news.”

— Susan Orlean

57. “Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn’t “matter”, that it’s trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I’d write about art.”

— Susan Orlean

58. “I have come to believe that books have souls – why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”

— Susan Orlean

59. “Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways.”

— Susan Orlean

60. “I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I’ll probably be given jewelry instead.”

— Susan Orlean

61. “The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired. I have been tired for decades. I am tired in the morning and I am tired while becalmed in the slough of the afternoon, and I am tired in the evening, except right when I try to go to sleep.”

— Susan Orlean

62. “You could go crazy thinking of how unprivate our lives really are – the omnipresent security cameras, the tracking data on our very smart phones, the porous state of our Internet selves, the trail of electronic crumbs we leave every day.”

— Susan Orlean

63. “I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle – a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own – and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.”

— Susan Orlean

64. “I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.”

— Susan Orlean

65. “Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.”

— Susan Orlean

66. “Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It’s like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

— Susan Orlean

67. “I think on a day-to-day basis, what attracts us in coexisting with another living, evolving thing, is that you have a relationship that’s different than with a piece of furniture. We experience the cycle of life through these other beings.”

— Susan Orlean

68. “What’s funny is that the idea of popularity – even the use of the word ‘popular’ – is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a central concern.”

— Susan Orlean

69. “My inspiration is really very simple: I’m struck by things that I want to know more about. I really do react just as a curious person: who is this person? What’s the story behind this situation? Why do people like this or dislike this thing?”

— Susan Orlean

70. “Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it’s hard to be happy about a bookseller’s demise.”

— Susan Orlean

71. “In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.”

— Susan Orlean

72. “Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people’s university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.”

— Susan Orlean

73. “Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad.”

— Susan Orlean

74. “The lesson we have yet to learn from dogs, that could sustain us, is that having no apprehension of the past or future is not limiting but liberating.”

— Susan Orlean

75. “On the very same day that I ordered an iPad 2, I went shopping to buy myself a letter opener. I like to cover all my bases.”

— Susan Orlean

76. “The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

— Susan Orlean

77. “Architect Robert Alexander, who was the business partner of celebrated California architect Richard Neutra, decided to protest the proposed destruction of the garden. He chained himself to a rock near the Well of the Scribes and said he would stay there until the paving plan was abandoned.”

— Susan Orlean

78. “Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place – it is a transit point, a passage.”

— Susan Orlean

79. “One of my favorite activities as a teen-ager was to watch television over the phone with my best friend.”

— Susan Orlean

80. “According to a 2010 study, almost three hundred million Americans used one of the country’s 17,078 public libraries and bookmobiles in the course of the year.”

— Susan Orlean

81. “Writers like to write, and writing in different forms – short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention – all interest me.”

— Susan Orlean

82. “College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.”

— Susan Orlean

83. “World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.”

— Susan Orlean

84. “This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”

— Susan Orlean

85. “The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.”

— Susan Orlean

86. “My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.”

— Susan Orlean

87. “Throughout her life, Warren published little tip sheets – ‘Althea’s Ways to Achieve Reading’ – to encourage people to find time for books. She approved of fibbing if it gave you an additional opportunity read. ‘The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you’re afraid she’ll catch it,’ she wrote in one of her tip sheets. ‘Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor.”

— Susan Orlean

88. “When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.”

— Susan Orlean

89. “Most fourth graders can’t say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that.”

— Susan Orlean

90. “I’ve definitely taken a lot of consolation from animals in my life. There have been times when I’ve been really sad, and they gave solace and comfort and companionability more than a person.”

— Susan Orlean

91. “Every corny thing that’s said about living with nature – being in harmony with the earth, feeling the cycle of the seasons – happens to be true.”

— Susan Orlean

92. “I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don’t find it crippling to work on one rather than the other.”

— Susan Orlean

93. “I remember thinking that a girdle was barbaric, and that never in a million years would I treat myself like a sleeping bag being shoved into a stuff sack. Never! Instead, I would run marathons and work out and be in perfect shape and reject the tyranny of the girdle forever.”

— Susan Orlean

94. “Here’s a habit I never thought I’d develop: I gravitate to anything online that’s marked ‘most popular’ or ‘most e-mailed.’ And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.”

— Susan Orlean

95. “I don’t turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.”

— Susan Orlean

96. “I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can’t throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try.”

— Susan Orlean

97. “Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it’s worth knowing about them. That’s challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.”

— Susan Orlean

98. “We do a lot of bird-watching up in the country, but we almost never have a chance to people-watch. There simply aren’t enough human beings up here: there is nowhere you can park yourself with a cup of coffee and observe the species on parade.”

— Susan Orlean

99. “I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I’m inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension.”

— Susan Orlean

100. “I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.”

— Susan Orlean