Librarians Day Quotes

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

The requirement for anyone running for elected office to have held a position of public service, such as fireman, school teacher, librarian, scout leader, or policeman was never actually passed into law. Still the range of day jobs that some of our Congress people now hold are pretty amazing. Somehow these days a background as a lawyer is a big minus.

I just said, 'Well, the real people performing miracles every day are librarians,' and we all laughed ourselves off our chairs.

TODAY IS A magnificent black T-shirt day. Write today in your diaries. Tell your grandchildren stories about it. I tear my eyes away, but they slide back moments later. Underneath that T-shirt is a body that could fog an elderly librarian’s glasses. I think my underwear is curling off me like burning paper.

Well, it doesn't sound particularly noble and knightly to say you've rescued the Chief Cook and Librarian, does it? And it has cut down on the number of interruptions. I used to get two or three knights a day, and now there's only about one a week. And the ones who do come are at least smart enough to figure out that I'm still a princess even if the dragons call me Chief Cook

From the time I was a baby, my mom took me to the library at least once a week. Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.

Once there was a bunny. This bunny had a birthday party. It was the bestest birthday party ever. Because that was the day the bunny got a bazooka. THe bunny loved his bazooka. He blew up all sorts of things on the farm. He blew up the stable of Henrietta the Horse. He blew up the pen of Pugsly the Pig. He blew up the coop of Chuck the Chicken. "I have the bestest bazooka ever," the bunny said. Then the farm friends proceeded to beat him senseless and steal his bazooka. It was the happiest day of his life. The end. Epilogue: Pugsly the Pig, now without a pen, was quite annoyed. When none of the others were looking, he stole the bazooka. He tied a bandana on his head and swore vengeance for what had been done to him. "From this day on," he whispered, raising the bazooka, "I shall be known as Hambo.

Even now, she wished she could write a note, push it across the table, and go away to her room. But she was no longer a Second Assistant Librarian of the Great Library of the Clayr. Those days were gone, vanished with everything else that had defined her previous existence and identity.

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life,perhaps even the answer sought by Borges's librarians—all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them,engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives

The library was like a second home. Or maybe more like a real home, more than the place I lived in. By going every day I got to know all the lady librarians who worked there. They knew my name and always said hi. I was painfully shy, though, and could barely reply.

I was just turned last week. I'm a librarian." He stilled, as if I'd just told him I was the inventor of the tube top. "I watched a movie about a librarian once. Well, she was a librarian by day, a call girl by--" I stopped him with a quick lift of an eyebrow. "If you finish that sentence, we cannot be friends.

I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

Somhow those Ten Men -- at the time they were called Recruiters, of course -- discovered that Constance had been at the library. Most likely one of their informants saw her come out, because it was on that very day that the brutes showed up and threatened the librarians. Who told them nothing, incidentally.' 'The same thing happened in Holland,' Kate reflected. 'You'd think these guys would learn their lesson -- librarians know how to keep quiet.' 'It helps to ask politely,' said Mr. Benedict

We're librarians, sir. And we will not let you check out this future librarian unless your prove to us that you'll take good care of him when he's in your home.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED.

...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj. And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

Dash said, "From the time I was a baby, my mom took me to the library at least once a week. Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books." "And escape." "Escape sure. But it wasn't so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. Possibility. Magic.

There's a term you don't hear these days, one you used to hear all the time when the Carnegie branches opened: Palaces for the People. The library really is a palace. It bestows nobility on people who otherwise couldn't afford a shred of it. People need to have nobility and dignity in their lives. And you know, they need other people to recognize it in them too.

One day, Belle, we will be able to reach back through the decades and claim you as one of our own. Your accomplishments will be part of history; they’ll show doubtful white people what colored people can do. Until that time, live your life proudly.

You know this girl. Her hair is neither long nor short nor light nor dark. She parts it precisely in the middle. She sits precisely in the middle of the classroom, and when she used to ride the school bus, she sat precisely in the middle of that, too. She joins clubs, but is never the president of them. Sometimes she is the secretary; usually, just a member. When asked, she has been known to paints sets for the school play. She always has a date to the dance, but is never anyone’s first choice. In point of fact, she’s nobody’s first choice for anything. Her best friend became her best friend when another girl moved away. She has a group of girls she eats lunch with every day, but God, how they bore her. Sometimes, when she can’t stand it anymore, she eats in the library instead. Truth be told, she prefers books to people, and the librarian always seems happy to see her. She knows there are other people who have it worse—she isn’t poor or ugly or friendless or teased. Of course, she’s also aware that the reason no one teases is because no one ever notices her. This isn’t to say she doesn’t have qualities. She is pretty, maybe, if anyone would bother to look. And she gets good enough grades. And she doesn’t drink and drive. And she says NO to drugs. And she is always where she says she will be. And she calls when she’s going to be late. And she feels a little, just a little, dead inside. She thinks, You think you know me, but you don’t. She thinks, None of you has any idea about all the things in my heart. She thinks, None of you has any idea how really and truly beautiful I am. She thinks, See me. See me. See me. Sometimes she thinks she will scream. Sometimes she imagines sticking her head in an oven. But she doesn’t. She just writes it all down in her journal and waits. She is waiting for someone to see.

All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush. “I’m afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks,” Chris told me kindly. “But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot ’em, and you’re a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough!

The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself.

I should mention here that librarians tell me never to tell this story, and especially never to paint myself as a feral child who was raised in libraries by patient librarians; the tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children.

One of the happiest days of my life was when my mother wrote a note to the public librarians saying 'Let her check out anything she wants'...I'd read everything we had at home by the time I was ten. So I read my way through the Flagstaff Public Library.

Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do.

The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.

Every day, librarians enforce copyright policies that we may disagree with and that, in some ways, run contrary to the values of our profession. Every day, librarians must decide between a desire to preserve the privacy of our community members and offering services our communities demand. Every day, librarians must make a choice between doing what’s easy, doing what’s right, and determining what’s right in the first place. No textbook or mission statement or policy document can relieve us of the necessity to make those decisions, nor remove the complexity of those decisions. That’s why we are librarians and why librarians are professionals, not clerks. That’s why we are stewards within the communities we serve, not servants to them. That’s why we must shape the missions and the work of our organizations and communities, and not simply accept them.

[W]hat people truly desire is access to the knowledge and information that ultimately lead to a better life--the collected wisdom of the ages found only in one place: a well-stocked library. To the teachers and librarians and everyone on the frontlines of bringing literature to young people: I know you have days when your work seems humdrum, or unappreciated, or embattled, and I hope on those days you will take a few moments to reflect with pride on the importance of the work you do. For it is indeed of enormous importance--the job of safeguarding and sharing the world's wisdom. All of you are engaged in the vital task of providing the next generation with the tools they will need to save the world. The ability to read and access information isn't just a power--it's a superpower. Which means that you aren't just heroes--you're superheroes. I believe that with all my heart.

Why do you love books so much?” It wasn’t a hostile question, like I was jealous of those firm, colorful spines that beheld so much wonder between their…pages. I was genuinely curious. Dash said, “From the time I was a baby, my mom took me to the library at least once a week. Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.” “And escape?” “Escape, sure. But it wasn’t so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. Possibility. Magic.

INTERVIEWER You’re self-educated, aren’t you? BRADBURY Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books? I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

When Kate was younger, stories were her friends when she found people challenging. She searched them out, hiding among them in the library and tucking herself into their pages. She folded herself into the shape of Hermione Granger or George from The Famous Five or Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey and tried to be them for a day. When she started secondary school her friends were the characters she met in the pages of her books. They sat with her in the library as she snuck mouthfuls of sandwich behind books so the librarian wouldn't see. (The librarian always saw, but pretended not to.)

When people ask me that question that everyone asks: "What do you do?" I'd say, "I'm in customer service," which was true. To me, it's nice day's work when you make a lot of people smile. I know that sounds too earnest, but it's true. I mean, I would rather be a librarian, but I worry about the job security. Books may be temporary; dicks are forever.

She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since...

Once again the library saves the day. Provides everything I could ever hope to learn... (Back in civilization when I grow up I think I might want to be a librarian.) -Maddie

If you refer to your librarian as your dealer, this is the place for you. —SIGN AT DEL SOL PUBLIC LIBRARY

Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn't get her period for the next four months.

I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.' Librarian: 'Okay.' '--' Librarian: '--' '--' Librarian: 'Enjoy your day!

But giving a book you adore to a complete stranger is a terribly vulnerable feeling. I don’t know how librarians do it all day long.

Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood, or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.

Hey!' I called with an annoyed voice. 'Charles!' The little Pteradactyl looked up. 'Ah, my good friend!' 'What about the chaos?' I demanded. 'Done!' Charles said. 'We each moved six books out of their proper places,' called George the Stegosaurus. 'It will take them days to find them all and put them back.' 'Though we did put them into place backward,' Charles said. 'You know, so they could be seen more easily. We wouldn't want it to be too hard.' 'Too hard?' I asked, stupefied. 'Charles, these are the people who were going to kill you and bury your bones in an archaeological dig!' 'Well, that's no reason to be uncivilized!' Charles said.

Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.” “And escape?

librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.

She realizes with sadness that it was on this day, not the day of her first period, that she left her childhood behind. That was the day she stopped being afraid of skeletons and old stories about phantom hands, and started being afraid of men.

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books? I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

I am about to step forward to assist, but she seems all right, rubbing her head and apologizing to the entire world. I hope she doesn’t stab herself with a straw or spontaneously combust. Then I’ll never get my coffee. I cannot start my day without it.

So you,” she said, meeting his eyes, “are a librarian. What does that make me then? A seven-day loan?” Daniel laughed as he set his book aside. He moved toward her and lightly gripped her knees. “Seven-day loan… I’m not sure I like the thought of giving you back.” He slid his hands up her thighs and took her by the hips. “But what about overdue fines?” she asked, playfully flashing her eyes at him. “I think I can afford them,” he said. Eleanor tried to voice another protest but his mouth was already on hers.

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, p e r h a p s even the answer sought by Borges's librarians—all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives

Thanks to my librarians and booksellers who recommend my books - you are magic. Thanks to the bloggers and everyday readers who tell a friend, " You've gotta read this." Thanks to the readers who write me nice notes, which always tend to hit my inbox on my lowest days.

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.

And to love such a librarian requires a surrendering to her eccentricities, a bowing to her pathological quietness, an obeisance to a reticence that is utterly untreatable. If you cannot commit to this sort of dedication, then let her be. Let her wander in wonder among her books and live out her days in her own world without you.

In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.

To: Runit Happerman, Head Librarian, Portland Public Library. From: Multnomah County Board. The Board has been notified by the Aylantik Government that the Portland Library will be permanently closed ten days from the above date. A meeting will be held on the Field today at ten-hundred to resolve pending issues. Closing will be facilitated by the AOI.

From the first days of Alexandria, the mission of libraries hasn’t been simply books. They are a safety net for civilization.

It was Chaos on Glitter Ice. A massacre of librarians.

Still bemused, Marjorie said, ‘Yes, Jimmy Choos – not exactly librarian footwear, but it scares the daylights out of the city councillors when it comes to the budget.’ Glenda

That was the day she stopped being afraid of

Creating a world within the imagination one day at a time through words and colors.

I came to view the world as a word puzzle and, with no special aptitude I can name, fixed on the whys and wherefores of language from my earliest days. Song lyrics. Signs. The stories read in first and second grades. My parents almost always read to us at bedtime. Poems by Whittier. Scenes from Oliver Twist. Kidnapped. Treasure Island. The names alone intrigued me. Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawney. The name Balfour sounded the knell of the romantic. Robinson Crusoe. I loved to hear read the exploits of Natty Bumppo. Authors had an aura of the godlike to me. The Latin prayers fascinated me as an altar boy. I can still recall carved names on buildings I saw from the MTA train when I was a youngster. Who can explain why? Words were magic to me. I once inadvisably glued my finger and thumb together at the Magoun Library in fourth grade trying to amuse a pretty little girl on whom I had a crush, and when the librarian came over angrily to inquire what the problem was and I pointed with a shrug and replied, “Mucilage”—a word that always made me laugh—she very coldly stated, “You are more to be pitied than censured.

The mind that asks and experiments and evaluates will die one day, but will provide a richer life for its owner. The mind that does nothing but rest inside the brain doesn't sidestep the puddle. It's sitting in it.

She recognizes the cramped handwriting, the internecine, slashing script. She has studied it under the gaze of the Institute Librarian, in locked rooms -- she even, in the early, giddy days of her conversion, practiced Fulton's handwriting for hours. Knows the ink. . . . Here it is now, on the familiar notebook paper Fulton preferred. She tracked down the manufacturer once; they have a plant across the river where they still turn out the Fontaine line.

She realizes with sadness that it was on that day, not the day of her first period, that she left her childhood behind. That was the day she stopped being afraid of skeletons and old stories about phantom hands, and started being afraid of men.

I suppose I could have been nicer when I was at Columbia. I could have been polite, respectful, turned in my papers on time. Funny thing is, I knew a guy like that. English major. Loved to read. Never got in any trouble, just hung out in Butler Library reading poetry and English history. Ran into him the other day. Guy has three master's degrees, taught high school, even did a few years in the Marines. Know what he does today? He makes $9.75 an hour as a librarian. I was a jerk when I went to Columbia. But I was never a sucker.

Albion Park on a fierce spring morning. A mad March day of ice and fire. Thomas's feet beat a tattoo on the path. Every hair, every bristle on his chin stands on end. He is a small star-ship of blazing neurons- He is a librarian on his way to work, half-blind with sun and cold and memory.

The most successful students are those who know that they can do better than grasp at the closest source of information. Reference librarians, who spend their days learning what is available in a broad range of fields and how to search for it, provide a great service for students and other library patrons.

Exhibit D: The Cots (or, If You Give a Librarian a Closet) If you give a librarian a closet, she will probably fill it with junk. If she fills it with junk, some of the junk will be books in need of repair. If some of the junk is books, and the closet is off of a back room anyway, she will hide more books there, books that she thinks are crap like the Stormy Sisters series, but which her boss thinks the library should keep. If she hides crappy books there, she will be in no rush to clean the closet, since she would then be out a hiding place. If she goes ten months without cleaning it, she will go to great lengths to hide the mess from her alcoholic and temperamental boss. If she wants to hide the mess from her boss, she will stuff the front of the closet with cots that were once used for nap hour of the short-lived library day care, circa 1996. If she stuffs the closet with cots… the closet will fester unopened for months. If the closet festers unopened for months, the librarian will probably decorate the closet door with cartoons and posters in an effort to distract her fellow librarians from the thought of ever opening the closet. If a librarian decorates a closet door, she will use such items as a Conan the Librarian cartoon, a large stocker that says “the world is quiet here,” a poster of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a CPR chart, and a bookstore café napkin signed by Michael Chabon. If she uses these items, her boss will ask, “What the hell does this mean, ‘The world is quiet here’? Is it political?” And her boss will also ask, “you’re not filing Michael Chabon in the children’s section, are you?” but her boss, distracted by these items, will never think to open the door. If her boss never opens the door, she will forget she has given the librarian a closet and will, by the end of the year, offer the librarian a second closet. If she gives the librarian a second closet, the librarian will probably fill it with junk.

Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject. Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again. By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn’t write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, “Stout’s supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin.” That’s how I’ve always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, “Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?” She smiled, I recall, and said, “Why, yes. Dozens.

She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs - young adulthood reduced to "YA," mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.

Up until a certain afternoon, at closing time, the librarian may come and return me to the shelf where I belong, the precise place where someone grabbed me one fine day, who knows why, perhaps to learn to translate sadness into another language, perhaps to love me as a beloved book—that is, forever. No, not forever. — Gemma Gorga, from poem “31,” Book of Minutes, transl. Sharon Dolin (Oberlin College Press, 2019)

...Not many people care much about the past. We don’t get folks your age in here. It’s either the elderly, or parents come in with their hollering little devil kids. Feel more like a social worker than a librarian most days. But that’s life, ain’t it?” “I guess so.” “Sure it is. You’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “It don’t go the way you think it should, but it goes alright. I’ll be up front if you need anything.

Once, in the morning, I decided I would be a biologist, and spent hours in the library studying, preparing for my amazing career. I told the librarian, who still smiles at me. She must think I will get out of this place and make it one day. One book I found about organisms was so fascinating I sat down with it in the stacks, engrossed. It took me fifteen minutes to realise it was about orgasms. I read until lunch and then hid the book on the shelf.

My job is never boring," Staples said. "There's nuts-and-bolts stuff like getting the tarpaulin over the shaft when it rains, and so in. Cataloging and reshelving. The shelves are in a shocking state. And when you've got everything ever written or lost to keep track of, it's quite a job. And there's fetching books. "I used to really look forward to requests for books way down in the abyss. We'd all rope up, follow our lines down for miles. The order falls apart a way down but you learn to sniff out class-marks. Sometimes we'd be gone for weeks, fetching volumes.' She spoke with a faraway voice. "There are risks. Hunters, animals, and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets separated. Twenty years ago, I was in a group looking for a book someone had requested. I remember, it was called 'Oh, All Right Then': Bartleby Returns. We were led by Ptolemy Yes. He was the man taught me. Best librarian there's ever been, some say. "Anyway, after weeks of searching, we ran out of food and had to turn back. No one likes it when we fail, so none of us were feeling great. "We felt that much worse when we realized that we'd lost Ptolemy. "Some people say he went off deliberately. That he couldn't bear not to find the book. That he's out there still in the Wordhoard Abyss, living off shelf-monkeys, looking. And that he'll be back one day, book in his hand.

Because I have lived ninety-two years, Raymond, and if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that we are never so unique as we think we are. We are all people. Sure, some things will be different from one person to the next. Some people have more of those feelings than others. Some have too much, and it causes all manner of havoc. Some have none at all. But I can tell you this as a human being who’s had a lot of experience being one: If you’re feeling something, other people in other places are feeling it, too. It’s never just us. But don’t take my word for it. Explore the world for yourself. Look it up. Research it. In my day we went to the library and had to get up the nerve to tell the librarian what we were looking for. You, you have it easy. You have a computer, yes? So why sit here talking to an old woman when you have all of the recorded knowledge the world has gathered sitting upstairs on your desk?

Miss Rudy, the former Harmony librarian, had single-handedly held off a siege of the town council bent on cutting her funds. She had locked the library doors and hid the only key in her bra, living on water from the toilet tank after the town had shut off water to the building to drive her out. She ate paste to keep up her strength. Oh, they had underestimated her. On the fourth day, the men of the council had capitulated, apologizing for cutting the funds, begging her to open the doors and come out. But she had stayed in the library an extra day, just to show them one could live on books, then marched out at noon on the fifth day, her head held high, and three pounds heavier. She had gained weight! When word got out, her picture made the cover of American Libraries magazine. Admiring letters poured in from librarians around the world – beaten down, beleaguered librarians who had drawn strength from her bravery. She answered each one in flowing, Palmer-method, handwritten script.

I meant it seriously. I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn't like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn't be a mother and it was likely you wouldn't become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You'd become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you'd have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

I was having a flashback, that the unnerving physical sensations—racing heart, sweaty palms, narrowing vision—I experienced that day (and that I will continue to experience many times in my life, even now, in my late eighties) are automatic responses to trauma. This is why I now object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one. But I wish I had known that I wasn’t a damaged person, that I was suffering the fallout of an interrupted life.

Writing novels seems like a glamorous and exciting occupation, although in reality I suspect that it’s a lot less glamorous than professional wrestling and only marginally more exciting than being a librarian. To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

If you like cool, funny entertainment, you might like this one. It's a first novel by a local author." She handed him a copy of Practical Demonkeeping. "A very different kind of buddy novel. I thought it was hilarious." "You're reading me like a book." The guy shook his head as if embarrassed by his own lame joke. Then he looked over at Blythe. Natalie saw his gaze move swiftly over her mother's red V-neck sweater and short skirt. "How can you tell that's exactly what would make me happy?" he asked. Oh boy. He was flirting. Guys did that a lot with her mom. She was super pretty, and Natalie knew it wasn't only because Mom was her mom and all kids thought their moms were pretty. Even her snottiest friends like Kayla said Blythe looked like a model. Like Julia Roberts. Plus, her mom had a knack for dressing cool and being social---she could talk to anyone and make them like her. Also, she had a superpower, which was on full display right now. She had the ability to see a person for the first time and almost instantly know what book to recommend. She was really smart and had also read every book ever written, or so it seemed to Natalie. She could talk to high school kids about Ivanhoe and Silas Marner. She ran a mystery discussion group. She could tell people the exact day the new Mary Higgins Clark novel would come out. She knew which kids would only ever read Goosebumps books, no matter what, and she knew which kids would try something else, like Edward Eager or Philip Pullman. Sometimes people didn't know anything about the book they were searching for except "It's blue with gold page edges" and her mom would somehow figure it out.

I’m sure Vera would be happy to help you with any research.” He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “Vera, the librarian? I think I’d like to avoid her as much as possible, although that was some fascinating stuff she shared the other day about bats.” I tried to recall which stuff she’d said about bats. I’d heard it all so many times, it was simply back-ground noise. “She has a long-standing and well-intentioned fixation on the island’s bat shortage, but sometimes she’s a little, um… tedious.” “Oh, I don’t know about tedious,” he said casually. “Personally, I found all that stuff about how fruit bats perform fellatio to be quite educational.

Do you ever get tired of being so funny? It's a nice little smoke screen, but I know you. Confident people do stuff. They get stuff done. They make things, even if it's just making money. You know what you're making?" "It doesn't matter." "You're making our couch sag. That's about it. You're making your mom sad because you're not trying. You're making your siblings miserable because you're acting like you're miserable." "I am. I'm depressed and on a bunch of drugs. I want to take more of them every day just to feel different." "This isn't depression and that's not their fault. But I don't want to fight. I think what we're about to do is going to give you a way to make some progress." "There's nothing important about lifting weights." "There's nothing insignificant about progress. Let's just give it a try.

The parents of some fellow students in the gifted and talented class owned a bookstore, and when he was about eleven they gave him a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. He read it all in the space of a couple of days, and immediately read it again. Then he brought the book to the public library and told the woman at the desk, „I want other books like this”. She gave him a handful of fantasy novels. He brought them back. „No, this isn't it.” That went on for a time, until finally one day the librarian – no doubt with some misgivings; the boy was only eleven years old – handed him a copy of War and Peace. „This is it!” he told the librarian about a week later. „This is just like Lord of the Rings!” Years afterward he'd say, „I mean, what could be more religious than Lord of the Rings or War and Peace?

In the months after the attacks, it was hard to imagine that life would ever go back to normal. It never will for many people, like my friend who lost her brother; like the hundreds of firefighters who have serious health problems caused by the toxic smoke and dust they breathed at Ground Zero; like the thousands who managed to escape that day, but who saw the horrors up close. Today, while the horrors of that day still linger, the city itself is more vibrant than ever. People have done their best to move forward. So why did I write this book? Because after talking to many kids, teachers, and librarians, I began to understand why so many of you asked me to. September 11 shaped the world you were born into. It’s only natural that you would be curious about it. I hope my story gives you a sense of that day — the fear and the courage, the sense of horror and shock. I will admit that in my plans for this story,

It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn’t be a mother and it was likely you wouldn’t become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You’d become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn’t be a mother and it was likely you wouldn’t become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you were stuck. You’d become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself

I meant it seriously. I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, like, the absolute second after you were born, the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. You were a boy, and already it was certain you wouldn’t be a mother and it was likely you wouldn’t become a manicurist or a kindergarten teacher. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed the tunnel in some more. You broke your arm climbing a tree and you ruled out being a baseball pitcher. You failed every math test you ever took and you canceled any hope of being a scientist. Like that. On and on through the years until you will stuck. You’d become a baker or a librarian or a bartender. Or an accountant. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.

The same song was playing the second I met my ex–best friend and the moment I realized I’d lost her. I met my best friend at a neighborhood cookout the year we would both turn twelve. It was one of those hot Brooklyn afternoons that always made me feel like I'd stepped out of my life and onto a movie set because the hydrants were open, splashing water all over the hot asphalt. There wasn't a cloud in the flawless blue sky. And pretty black and brown people were everywhere. I was crying. ‘What a Wonderful World’ was playing through a speaker someone had brought with them to the park, and it reminded me too much of my Granny Georgina. I was cupping the last snow globe she’d ever given me in my small, sweaty hands and despite the heat, I couldn’t help imagining myself inside the tiny, perfect, snow-filled world. I was telling myself a story about what it might be like to live in London, a place that was unimaginably far and sitting in the palm of my hands all at once. But it wasn't working. When Gigi had told me stories, they'd felt like miracles. But she was gone and I didn't know if I'd ever be okay again. I heard a small voice behind me, asking if I was okay. I had noticed a girl watching me, but it took her a long time to come over, and even longer to say anything. She asked the question quietly. I had never met anyone who…spoke the way that she did, and I thought that her speech might have been why she waited so long to speak to me. While I expected her to say ‘What’s wrong?’—a question I didn’t want to have to answer—she asked ‘What are you doing?’ instead, and I was glad. “I was kind of a weird kid, so when I answered, I said ‘Spinning stories,’ calling it what Gigi had always called it when I got lost in my own head, but my voice cracked on the phrase and another tear slipped down my cheek. To this day I don’t know why I picked that moment to be so honest. Usually when kids I didn't know came up to me, I clamped my mouth shut like the heavy cover of an old book falling closed. Because time and taught me that kids weren't kind to girls like me: Girls who were dreamy and moony-eyed and a little too nice. Girls who wore rose-tonted glasses. And actual, really thick glasses. Girls who thought the world was beautiful, and who read too many books, and who never saw cruelty coming. But something about this girl felt safe. Something about the way she was smiling as she stuttered out the question helped me know I needn't bother with being shy, because she was being so brave. I thought that maybe kids weren't nice to girls like her either. The cookout was crowded, and none of the other kids were talking to me because, like I said, I was the neighborhood weirdo. I carried around snow globesbecause I was in love with every place I’d never been. I often recited Shakespeare from memory because of my dad, who is a librarian. I lost myself in books because they were friends who never letme down, and I didn’t hide enough of myself the way everyone else did, so people didn’t ‘get’ me. I was lonely a lot. Unless I was with my Gigi. The girl, she asked me if it was making me feel better, spinning the stories. And I shook my head. Before I could say what I was thinking—a line from Hamlet about sorrow coming in battalions that would have surely killed any potential I had of making friends with her. The girl tossed her wavy black hair over her shoulder and grinned. She closed her eyes and said 'Music helps me. And I love this song.' When she started singing, her voice was so unexpected—so bright and clear—that I stopped crying and stared at her. She told me her name and hooked her arm through mine like we’d known each other forever, and when the next song started, she pulled me up and we spun in a slow circle together until we were both dizzy and giggling.

I'm a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I can't ever be happy or lead a normal life. My mother worked as a librarian when I was little and that's not feminine. She thinks it's deformed me. The other day a man came up to me in the bus and called me sweetie and said, "Why don't you smile? God loves you!" I just stared at him. But he wouldn't go away until I smiled, so finally I did. Everyone was laughing. I tried once, you know, went to a dance all dressed up, but I felt like such a fool. Everyone kept making encouraging remarks about my looks as if they were afraid I'd cross back over the line again; I was trying , you know, I was proving their way of life was right, and they were terrified I'd stop. When I was five I said, "I'm not a girl, I'm a genius," but that doesn't work, possibly because other people don't honor the resolve. Last year I finally gave up and told my mother I didn't want to be a girl but she said Oh no, being a girl is wonderful. Why? Because you can wear pretty clothes and you don't have to do anything; the men will do it for you. She said that instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can't imbibe someone's success by fucking them.

Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes -- binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine -- he sees through the language he's working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code -- becomes a Ba'al Shem of sorts." "Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward." "Is Sumerian really that good?" "Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians -- who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today -- had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone." "Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.

What no one tells you is that there will be a last time you ever carry your child. A last time you tuck them in. A last time they run into your arms off the school bus. All through his infancy, Dylan was attached to me, almost literally. I nursed him, and he was fussy, so I carried him almost constantly, patting his back, humming to him, breathing in his delicious baby scent. He didn’t walk till he was fourteen months old, and I loved that, because I got to carry him that much longer. I took him for hikes in a backpack, his little knees hitting my ribs. I carried him on my shoulders, him clinging to fistfuls of my hair. I loved every minute. He was an affectionate boy full of drooly kisses and cuddles. He was generous with his hugs, from Paul at the post office to Christine, our librarian. And especially with me. Every night when I read him bedtime stories, his sweet little head would rest against my shoulder, and he’d idly stroke my arm, smelling like Dove soap and baby shampoo. Driving in the car was like a tranquilizer dart for Dylan . . . even bumping down our long dirt road wouldn’t wake him up, and I’d park the car, get out and unbuckle him, then lift his sweaty little body into my arms to carry him inside and just sit on the couch with him in my arms, heart against heart. And then one day, he no longer needed that. The bedtime stories stopped when he was about ten and wanted to read to himself. The last time I attempted to carry him from the car, he woke up and said, “It’s okay, Mom. I’m awake.” He never needed that again. Had someone told me “This is the last time you’ll get to carry your son,” I would have paid more attention. I would have held him as long as I could. They don’t tell you that your son will stop kissing you with sweet innocence, and those smooches will be replaced with an obligatory peck. They don’t tell you that he won’t want a piggyback ride ever again. That you can’t hold his hand anymore. That those goofy, physical games of chasing and tickling and mock wrestling will end one day. Permanently. All those natural, easy, physical gestures of love stop when your son hits puberty and is abruptly aware of his body . . . and yours. He doesn’t want to hug you the same way, finding your physicality perhaps a little . . . icky . . . that realization that Mom has boobs, that Mom’s stomach is soft, that Mom and Dad have sex, that Mom gets her period. The snuggles stop. This child, the deepest love of your life, won’t ever stroke your arm again. You’ll never get to lie in bed next to him for a bedtime chat, those little talks he used to beg for. No more tuck-ins. No more comforting after a bad dream. The physical distance between the two of you is vast . . . it’s not just that he’ll only come so close for the briefest second, but also the simple fact that he isn’t that little boy anymore. He’s a young man, a fully grown male with feet that smell like death and razor stubble on his once petal-soft cheeks.

In those days, before everyone had cell phones or smartphones or iPods, the library was a quieter place. The librarians, many of whom had received their degrees in Library Science in the 1950s, enforced this silence with the zeal of a born-again monk. In fact, the only place as quiet, then or now, was the church.

Text, here, is rather light on words these days, honey. He's every librarian's dream. My good buddy hasn't breathed a word in six years. He's the reigning champion of 'who-can-shut-up-the-longest.' He gets a gold star for his efforts.

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad... The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day.

Many of my friends think I read books all day and alphabetize the shelves. Well, sometimes I do alphabetize shelves. But more often than not, my job title could be "friend". Or just simply "caring ear." Public librarians are often part information seekers, part social workers.

valley? That should be interesting for you.” “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet.” “I’d be happy to help,” Mr. Bally said. “I’m an expert on the subject you’re studying.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “Judges in these contests like primary sources.” I knew that. Judges in these contests always liked primary sources. I was already using one. “Tell me about Andover,” I’d said to Cissy Langer, sitting in her back room with a wall full of piggy dolls staring at me. “Oh, my goodness, Mimi, what a question,” she’d said. I took the glass of iced tea, and I took the plate of chocolate chip cookies, and I set my tape recorder between them. I’d borrowed it from the school librarian. “I’ve already got some primary sources,” I said to Winston Bally in the conference room. We all pick and choose the things we talk about, I guess. I’d listened to my mother and Cissy talk about growing up together for maybe hundreds of hours, about sharing a seat and red licorice ropes on the bus, about getting licked for wearing their Sunday dresses into the woods one day, about the years when they both moved back in with their parents while their husbands went to war. And somehow I’d never really noticed that all the stories started when they were ten, that there were no stories about the four-year-old Miriam, the six-year-old Cissy, about the day when they were both seven when Ruth came home from the hospital, a bundle of yellow crochet yarn and dirty diaper. It made sense, I guess, since it turned out Cissy had grown up in a place whose name I’d never even heard because it had been wiped off the map before I’d ever even been born. “My whole family lived in Andover,” Cissy said. “My mother and

As he was discussing this with Sarao, it occurred to me that a large part of a city librarian’s job is to be a property manager. Szabo is responsible for seventy-three large structures that are spread across the 503 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. To even visit each one of the branches is a major proposition. Szabo’s days seesaw between big thoughts on the future of global information systems and minutiae such as requisitioning a city gardener to trim the weeds around the Washington Irving library.

The road to success is paved with mistakes. * * * You don't have to be perfect to be your best. * * * Sometimes, failing your way to fabulous is the path to success. * * * "Turn failure into your friend!

However, I’d obliged, reading from one of his Bibles, on that day the story of Joseph, the man who’d gone from prison to a prince. It had soothed him, and he now entreats this of me regularly, often having me read aloud to him from either the Bible—typically a rare

The other day, the village librarian told me that I had purchased all of his enchanted books and that he did not want to sell me anything else. He was super angry. He looked like this:

One day I was in my cozy basement reading when she came over. She always smelled great, and when I asked her what it was, she volunteered that it was Heaven Scent, a wildly popular perfume for young girls at that time. I so loved that smell and to be honest, I would have fallen in love with any woman who wore that scent.