Top 200 Susan Orlean Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.”

— Susan Orlean

102. “I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.”

— Susan Orlean

103. “Who on earth is going to use ‘utilize’ in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type ‘z,’ when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can’t think of a sentence in which ‘use’ can’t replace ‘utilize.’”

— Susan Orlean

104. “We’re fascinated by animals because it’s almost like having Martians living among us. We can see some familiarity in them, but they’re entirely different creatures.”

— Susan Orlean

105. “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

106. “A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone.”

— Susan Orlean

107. “I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that’s how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little – silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.”

— Susan Orlean

108. “I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise.”

— Susan Orlean

109. “In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.”

— Susan Orlean

110. “I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.”

— Susan Orlean

111. “Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that’s the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.”

— Susan Orlean

112. “I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn’t like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.”

— Susan Orlean

113. “I love Japanese design and fabrics. I also love people who make clothes for mass consumption but do it well and cleverly.”

— Susan Orlean

114. “Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn’t have to come in contact with it.”

— Susan Orlean

115. “A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press – a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on,...”

— Susan Orlean

116. “My mother imbued me with a love of libraries. The reason why I finally embraced this book project – wanted, and then needed, to write it – was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit.”

— Susan Orlean

117. “To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it’s in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.”

— Susan Orlean

118. “When I miss my mother these days, now that she is gone, I like to picture us in the car together, going for one more magnificent trip to Bertram Woods.”

— Susan Orlean

119. “Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in.”

— Susan Orlean

120. “The reading of the book was a journey.”

— Susan Orlean

121. “I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.”

— Susan Orlean

122. “I loved the fresh alkaline tang of new ink and paper, a smell that never emanated from a broken-in library book. I loved the crack of a newly flexed spine, and the way the brand-new pages almost felt damp, as if they were wet with creation.”

— Susan Orlean

123. “I think the responsibility of running a huge business, which happens if you become a successful designer, probably makes you more careful.”

— Susan Orlean

124. “There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.”

— Susan Orlean

125. “It seems that half the point of being in Miami Beach – particularly the northern end of South Beach – is to be observed by people-watchers like me, and the display along Ocean Drive during my visit was, as always, sublime.”

— Susan Orlean

126. “Goodhue wanted visitors to feel more than they were in a pretty building. He wanted them to feel they were part of a three-dimensional meditation on the power of human intellect and the potency of storytelling.”

— Susan Orlean

127. “I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time – it’s part of the fun for me as a writer.”

— Susan Orlean

128. “They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

— Susan Orlean

129. “Every single one of my books had its title changed almost as we were going to press, for all sorts of different reasons.”

— Susan Orlean

130. “I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date.”

— Susan Orlean

131. “Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.”

— Susan Orlean

132. “Writing about someone well known removes that obligation of defending it as a subject, but it also means that some of the surprise and freshness is already gone. It’s so different – in some ways much harder for me.”

— Susan Orlean

133. “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

134. “States should pass laws making it illegal to own or trade wild animals; the phony ‘educational’ permits that many private owners have used to skirt those laws should be eliminated.”

— Susan Orlean

135. “Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it’s a good story or just a seductive one?”

— Susan Orlean

136. “The reading of the book was a journey. There was no need for souvenirs.”

— Susan Orlean

137. “In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.”

— Susan Orlean

138. “The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.”

— Susan Orlean

139. “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

140. “I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose?”

— Susan Orlean

141. “The iPhone calendar isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view – it doesn’t have a week view, which drives me crazy.”

— Susan Orlean

142. “I was a Scholar and Frontiersman and a Two-fisted He-Person and that I went to the roots of that Sissy Library and made it, within two years, an Institution of Character, a He-Library, of which we were all proud.”

— Susan Orlean

143. “There’s a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.”

— Susan Orlean

144. “Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.”

— Susan Orlean

145. “We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string.”

— Susan Orlean

146. “An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.”

— Susan Orlean

147. “The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it’s original but quite the opposite – the feeling that it has existed all along.”

— Susan Orlean

148. “They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

— Susan Orlean

149. “Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.”

— Susan Orlean

150. “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”

— Susan Orlean