Avi Steinberg Quotes & Sayings

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 American public has been making for over thirty years. — Avi Steinberg

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.
"Okay," she said, handing it back, "I'll read it."
What in Flannery O'Connor's countenance met with Solitary's approval?
"I dunno," she said. "She looks kind of busted up, y'know? She ain't too pretty. I trust her. — Avi Steinberg

Pimps make the best librarians. — Avi Steinberg

Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident. — Avi Steinberg

Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. — Avi Steinberg

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. — Avi Steinberg

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. Emailed and immediately regretted. — Avi Steinberg

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

The space itself - its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history - reminded me of all that I didn't know and couldn't know. This itself is part of the wisdom of archives. By creating a finite space, where some things are included, some omitted, an archive challenges you to examine its dusty spaces, but more importantly, to search for what has been entirely left out. — Avi Steinberg

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster. — Avi Steinberg

His elegant librarianship ... made me appreciate how order is created: Not through grand schemes - to which I was often drawn - but by small graceful actions, repeated often and refined with time. — Avi Steinberg

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," he said, "gum wrappers as much as books." He said this with a hint of disdain.
"Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists," he said, "they're too crazy to throw anything out."
"You're right," I said. "I'm more of an archivist."
"And I'm more of a librarian," he said.
"Can we still be friends? — Avi Steinberg