Martha Cooley Quotes & Sayings

Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew
in the incontestable way that children know things
that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other. — Martha Cooley

With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. — Martha Cooley

I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares. — Martha Cooley

In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed. — Martha Cooley

My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian
the man in charge of the University's entire collection
is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact. — Martha Cooley

Librarians, too, are gatekeepers
not of actual experience, of course, but of its written accounts. My job is to safeguard those accounts. Not to judge them; simply to see to their proper dissemination. — Martha Cooley

I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide. — Martha Cooley

Past a certain point it is not interesting to think about childhood as the central drama and adulthood as its reprise. — Martha Cooley