“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
“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… — 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… — 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident.” — Avi Steinberg Copy Share
“His elegant librarianship ... made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes - to which I was often drawn - but… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share
“The space itself - its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history - reminded me of all that I didn't know and couldn't… — Avi Steinberg Copy Share
