Robin Sloan Quotes

The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected.

Is this a book club? How do they join? Do they ever pay? These are the things I ask myself when I sit here alone, after Tyndall or Lapin or Fedorov has left. Tyndall is probably the weirdest, but they’re all pretty weird: all graying, single-minded, seemingly imported from some other time or place. There are no iPhones. There’s no mention of current events or pop culture or anything, really, other than the books. I definitely think of them as a club, though I have no evidence that they know one another. Each comes in alone and never says a word about anything other than the object of his or her current, frantic fascination.

"Some of them are working hard indeed."
"What are they doing?"
"My boy!" he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading."

Immortality in a book-lined catacomb down beneath the surface of the earth, or death up here, with all this? I'll take death and a kebab.

"He paused, then added, "Some of them are working very hard indeed."
"What are they doing?"
"My boy!" he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

The measure of a bookstore is not its receipts, but its friends,” he says, “and here, we are rich indeed.

I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say, it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

I sit up straight and do the first thing a person is supposed to do in an emergency, which is send a text message.

Like I said, everything’s a treasure to somebody. But a lot of times, you can’t find that somebody.” That’s depressing. If these little objects, so significant to the history of printing and typography and human communication, were lost in a giant storage unit … what chance do any of us have?

We take the subway.Grumble's next message came through after breakfast, and it said:

theres a grumblegear3k waiting for you at 11 jay street in dumbo. ask for the hogwarts special. hold the shrooms.

I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You’re meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.

Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.

Maybe his big build isn't a linebacker's after all; maybe it's a librarian's.