Top 200 Susan Orlean Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”

— Susan Orlean

152. “The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.”

— Susan Orlean

153. “The fire in the library was colorless.”

— Susan Orlean

154. “You can find out anything you want about a car now, and especially every bit of information about the price, without relying on the dealers.”

— Susan Orlean

155. “On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.”

— Susan Orlean

156. “Winter in the country is very white. There is black grit on all the shoulders of the roads and on the big mounds from the plows, and all the cars are filthy, but the fields are dazzling and untouched and pristine.”

— Susan Orlean

157. “There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic.”

— Susan Orlean

158. “As she said in a speech to a library association in 1935, librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”

— Susan Orlean

159. “Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

— Susan Orlean

160. “I have no idea how to get in touch with anyone anymore. Everyone, it seems, has a home phone, a cell phone, a regular e-mail account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and a Web site. Some of them also have a Google Voice number. There are the sentimental few who still have fax machines.”

— Susan Orlean

161. “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.”

— Susan Orlean

162. “Keeping animals, I have learned, is all about water. Who even knew chickens drank water? I didn’t, but they do, and a lot.”

— Susan Orlean

163. “I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of ‘student-athletes.’ I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don’t believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that’s another story.”

— Susan Orlean

164. “Among all life forms, there are creatures with charisma and creatures without. It’s one of those ineffable qualities we can’t quite define, but we all seem to respond similarly to.”

— Susan Orlean

165. “I wanted to have my books around me, forming a totem pole of the narratives I’d visited.”

— Susan Orlean

166. “I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don’t see how it could possibly be bad.”

— Susan Orlean

167. “Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.”

— Susan Orlean

168. “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

169. “I’ve loved some gadgets that were not worthy, and I’ve loved gadgets that I would have loved more if I had waited for their developers to figure out how to really make them work, but I loved them anyway.”

— Susan Orlean

170. “I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.”

— Susan Orlean

171. “The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.”

— Susan Orlean

172. “Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.”

— Susan Orlean

173. “I approach stories as a private educational enterprise: I want to learn about something. I teach myself through research, reporting, and thinking, and then, when I feel like I know the story, I tell it to readers.”

— Susan Orlean

174. “When you’re researching you’re learning. When you’re writing, you’re teaching.”

— Susan Orlean

175. “When it comes to consumer electronics, I’m a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can’t resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta.”

— Susan Orlean

176. “It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, 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. 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

177. “Public libraries in the United States outnumber McDonald’s; they outnumber retail bookstores two to one.”

— Susan Orlean

178. “Even after I’d published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.”

— Susan Orlean

179. “The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I’m always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.”

— Susan Orlean

180. “You read and read and read and read,” she said, “and then what?”

— Susan Orlean

181. “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.”

— Susan Orlean

182. “A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press – a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: they take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books “the potency of life.”

— Susan Orlean

183. “Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.”

— Susan Orlean

184. “The one thing I’ve discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off.”

— Susan Orlean

185. “Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it’s more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone’s throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.”

— Susan Orlean

186. “I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.”

— Susan Orlean

187. “The fact that dogs are not people means you don’t have as much response to the particulars.”

— Susan Orlean

188. “I want to let my friend Buster know that I would like to have dinner with him tonight. Does Buster work at home? Then how likely is he to have his cell phone on? Is he one of those people who only turns on his cell when he’s in his car? I hate that.”

— Susan Orlean

189. “I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened?”

— Susan Orlean

190. “There are a lot of surprising things in the library; a lot of things you don’t think of when you try to imagine all of what a library might contain.”

— Susan Orlean

191. “The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.”

— Susan Orlean

192. “Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot Phalaenopsis in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche’s finishes were downright and absolute, and what’s more, he also shut off any chance of amends.”

— Susan Orlean

193. “Notionally, it was the anchor of the region, but it existed at such a spiritual and sociological remove that it could have been the moon. Most likely, people settling in the San Jacinto Valley hoped not to make their way closer to Los Angeles but to make their way farther from it.”

— Susan Orlean

194. “In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod, I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven’t listened to in years.”

— Susan Orlean

195. “Being a good designer certainly doesn’t guarantee that you’re good at business. It’s probably more surprising when the two talents coexist in one person.”

— Susan Orlean

196. “Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn’t get her period for the next four months.”

— Susan Orlean

197. “The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both.”

— Susan Orlean

198. “Apparently, everyone in Los Angeles gets on the computer right after Thanksgiving dinner and makes requests for diet books.”

— Susan Orlean

199. “In Los Angeles, moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open, and in them you might find a movie star, or a successful audition, or a chance encounter with a powerful person who, with a snap of his fingers, would change your life, like a wizard.”

— Susan Orlean

200. “The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.”

— Susan Orlean