Ian Sansom

“Children are bad enough--children are rude, selfish, greedy, and unthinking individuals who are unable to distinguish between their own selfish wants and needs and the wants and needs of others. And adults are children with money, alcohol, and power.”

“Israel was thinking of warm beer, and muffins, and Wensleydale cheese, and Wallace and Gromit, and the music of Elgar, and the Clash, and the Beatles, and Jarvis Cocker, and the white cliffs of Dover, and Big Bend, and the West End, and Stonehenge, and Alton Towers, and the Last Night of the Proms, and Glastonbury, and William Hogarth, and William Blake, and Just William, and Winston Churchill, and the North Circular Road, and Grodzinski's for coffee, and rubbish, and potholes, and a slice of Stilton and a pickled onion, and George Orwell. And Gloria, of course. He was almost home to Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A.”

“But then twitching nervously in the presence of a librarian wasn't an uncommon response—librarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with serious mental health disorders, can make people nervous. Librarians possess a kind of occult power, an aura. They could silence people with just a glance. At least, they did in Israel's fantasies. In Israel's fantasies, librarians were mild-mannered superheroes, with extrasensory perceptions and a highly developed sense of responsibility who demanded respect from everyone they met. In reality, Israel couldn't silence even Mrs Onions on her mobile phone when she was disturbing other readers.”

“Those who can, do; those who can't learn classification and cataloguing.”

“Israel had always thought that growing up was simply something that happened to you: you grew taller, more dextrous, you acquired language, learned to feed yourself, developed intellectually, went to school, got a mortgage, had children, got fatter and tired and full of regrets, and that was it, you were grown up, you were an adult. There was more to it than that though, apparently - and it was something that women knew, and men did not.”

“Everyone loved a good reader. And he'd always loved being a great reader - until recently. Maybe it was just part of getting older, or maybe it was being a librarian, or just being here, but lately he'd found he was becoming suspicious of his own love of books. All that reading - it had started to seem wrong, worthless almost, without purpose.”

“[L]ibrarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with mental health disorders, can make people nervous.”