A review by jacqui_des
The Library of Unrequited Love by Sophie Divry

3.0

Memorable Quotes

"Being a librarian isn’t an especially high-level job, I can tell you. Pretty close to being in a factory. I’m a cultural assembly line worker. So what you need to know is, to be a librarian, you have to like the idea of classification, and to be of a docile nature. No initiative, no room for the unexpected; here, everything is in its place, invariably in its place."

"To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world."

"Love, for me, is something I find in books. I read a lot, it’s comforting. You’re never alone if you live surrounded by books."

"When I’m reading, I’m never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you’re having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train of thought and you can accompany each other for weeks on end."

"Well, isn’t an American a European who missed the boat home? I don’t go anywhere nowadays, myself."

"Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life."

"The inexhaustible milk of human culture, right here, within our reach. Help yourself, it’s free. Borrow, because as much as accumulation of material things impoverishes the soul, cultural abundance enriches it."