I began to see it was the community, not the librarian, that was important to the library. Librarians were only as important as the community they inspired. If I was going to continue with this career, my job wouldn’t be to protect information, it would be to bring the community together and inspire them to appreciate everything a library stands for.

I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.

It's a cruel world, and unless you're blessed with some talent people will pay money to see, your friends are the only people who will get you where you need to go.

Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.

The library—the place in my life that was full of books—beagan to teach me that books weren't everything.

There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.