“Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city's dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.” — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“For days I kept imagining the fate of the world's misplaced letters. I started noticing them everywhere. All the right letters sitting on desks and dressers, slipped into purses, abandoned in email Draft folders, forever sealed and unsent. Shredded. Forgotten, sometimes intentionally. And the wrong letters, placed in someone else's hands - which, once delivered, may never be taken back.… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share
“I think you’re more an archivist than a librarian,” he said. He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They’re pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful. ”They like everything,”… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share
“I flipped to the author’s photo in the Library of America edition of O’Connor’s collected works, and forked it over. Solitary examined the photo.… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“Yet for quixotic reasons--namely, that I enjoyed writing obits--I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“An officer on an elevator in the Tower once told me he was proud of his job keeping bad guys out of society. "Someone's… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“Pimps make the best librarians. Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men. Gangsters, gunrunners, bank robbers- adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“All across America public libraries were, and are, being shut down, while prisons-with libraries-were, and are, being built. This has been a choice the… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books.… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
“Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident.” — Avi Steinberg Copy Share Image
