'When in doubt strike first. I am a librarian, you know.' (JD)
0 Comments
… a librarian must be prepared for any eventuality, including terrorists. When in doubt strike first, making certain no valuable volumes are harmed …. (JD)
‘You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all…’ (JD)
… anybody who knew the Dewey decimal system by heart was a person not to panic until the situation had been most carefully considered. (JD)
Another response of the wizards, when faced with a new and unique situation, was to look through their libraries to see if it had ever happened before. This was, Lord Vetinari reflected, a good survival trait. It meant that in times of danger you spent the day sitting very quietly in a building with very thick walls. (LH)
There was a new library in the Civic Centre. It was so new it didn't even have librarians. It had Assistant Information Officers. (JD)
The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word. (W)
People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered able to answer, such as ‘Is this the laundry?’ ‘How do you spell surreptitious?’ and, on a regular basis: ‘Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.' (GP)
... one book could be a library, if it was a book that made a big enough dimple in L-space. A book with a title like 100
Ways with Broccoli was unlikely to be one such, whereas The Relationship Between Capital and Labour might be, especially if it had an appendix on making explosives. (SODW) There are some laws, though, that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space. (SODW)
Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass, and on that simple equation rests the whole of L-space. It is via L-space that all books are connected (quoting the ones before them, and influencing the ones that come after). But there is no time in L-space. Nor is there, strictly speaking, any space. Nevertheless, L-space is infinitely large and connects all libraries, everywhere and everywhen. It’s never further than the other side of the bookshelf, yet only the most senior and respected librarians know the way in. (SODW)
A magical accident had once turned the University’s Librarian into an orangutan, a state which he enjoyed sufficiently to threaten, with simple and graphic gestures, anyone who suggested turning him back. The wizards noticed no difference now. An orangutan seemed such a natural shape for a librarian. (SODW)
... the Unseen University Library was a magical library, built on a very thin patch of space-time. There were books on distant shelves that hadn’t been written yet, books that never would be written. At least, not here. It had a circumference of a few hundred yards, but there was no known limit to its radius. (LC)
The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated. All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers. (LC)
'Am I alone in thinking, by the way, that it doesn’t add to the status of the University to have an ape on the faculty?’
‘Yes,’ said Ridcully flatly. ‘You are. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.' (IT) The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. (MA)
... all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence. (LL)
The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn’t bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books. (LL)
There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men. (MP)
The Librarian knuckled out into the Library of the here and now. Every hair on his body bristled with rage.
He pushed open the door and swung out into the stricken city. Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge. (GG) The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality. (GG)
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library. (GG)
There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there a few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be. (GG)
,,, [the librarian] had been allowed to keep his job, which he was rather good at, although ‘allowed’ is not really the right word. It was the way he could roll his upper lip back to reveal more incredibly yellow teeth than any other mouth the University Council had ever seen before that somehow made sure the matter was never really raised. (GG)
A magical accident in the Library, which as has already been indicated is not a place for your average rubber-stamp-and-Dewey-decimal employment, had some time ago turned the Librarian into an orang-utan. He had since resisted all efforts to turn him back. He liked the handy long arms, the prehensile toes and the right to scratch himself in public, but most of all he liked the way all the big questions of existence had suddenly resolved themselves into a vague interest in where his next banana was coming from. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the despair and nobility of the human condition. It was just that as far as he was concerned you could stuff it. (S)
|
Author
The world has lost Sir Terry, and it's so much the poorer for that. Vale Sir Terry. Categories
All
Archives
March 2023
|