Top 50 Susan Orlean Quotes

Most fourth graders can’t say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that.

Every corny thing that’s said about living with nature – being in harmony with the earth, feeling the cycle of the seasons – happens to be true.

Winter in the country is very white. There is black grit on all the shoulders of the roads and on the big mounds from the plows, and all the cars are filthy, but the fields are dazzling and untouched and pristine.

I can imagine a future in which real books will exist but in a more limited, particular way.

I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that’s how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little – silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.

It seems that half the point of being in Miami Beach – particularly the northern end of South Beach – is to be observed by people-watchers like me, and the display along Ocean Drive during my visit was, as always, sublime.

We do a lot of bird-watching up in the country, but we almost never have a chance to people-watch. There simply aren’t enough human beings up here: there is nowhere you can park yourself with a cup of coffee and observe the species on parade.

One of my favorite activities as a teen-ager was to watch television over the phone with my best friend.

When I heard about the Microsoft Kinect, though, I felt an urgency rising in me. A game you played without touching any machinery? A chance to wave your hands around, Minority-Report style, and move things around on a screen? This sounded like almost too much fun, with gadget-y pizzazz that sounded astonishing.

I would like to make sleeping my new hobby, except that I’m too tired, really, to have a hobby. But a girl can always dream.

The iPhone calendar isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. It only offers a day view and a month view – it doesn’t have a week view, which drives me crazy.

I’ve loved some gadgets that were not worthy, and I’ve loved gadgets that I would have loved more if I had waited for their developers to figure out how to really make them work, but I loved them anyway.

I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle – a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own – and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.

There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic.

They will be given as gifts; books that are especially pretty or visual will be bought as hard copies; books that are collectible will continue to be collected; people with lots of bookshelves will keep stocking them; and anyone who likes to make notes in books will keep buying books with margins to fill.

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

I love tearing things out of the ground. I love digging and discarding. I love pruning. In fact, I love pruning so much that I once gave myself carpal-tunnel syndrome because I attacked a trumpet vine with so much dedication.

I’m always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.

I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom – a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training – but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news.

Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways.

I don’t care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How could anyone actually argue about something that could be looked up?

There are cultures that believe having your photograph taken steals your soul. I don’t think there is a stolen soul in a picture, but still – why is it so hard to throw them away?

Writers like to write, and writing in different forms – short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention – all interest me.

Why, I wonder, should the popularity of a news story matter to me? Does it mean it’s a good story or just a seductive one?

I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

I want to let my friend Buster know that I would like to have dinner with him tonight. Does Buster work at home? Then how likely is he to have his cell phone on? Is he one of those people who only turns on his cell when he’s in his car? I hate that.

Here’s a habit I never thought I’d develop: I gravitate to anything online that’s marked ‘most popular’ or ‘most e-mailed.’ And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.

Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear.

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.

I have no idea how to get in touch with anyone anymore. Everyone, it seems, has a home phone, a cell phone, a regular e-mail account, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, and a Web site. Some of them also have a Google Voice number. There are the sentimental few who still have fax machines.

I remember thinking that a girdle was barbaric, and that never in a million years would I treat myself like a sleeping bag being shoved into a stuff sack. Never! Instead, I would run marathons and work out and be in perfect shape and reject the tyranny of the girdle forever.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn’t know.

The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I’m always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers’ block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!

I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of ‘student-athletes.’ I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don’t believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that’s another story.

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.

When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.

A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.

Borders had lousy management and made bad corporate decisions, so its fate is less like a terrible accident than a slow-motion slide into a ditch, but it’s hard to be happy about a bookseller’s demise.

Sometimes I’m dazzled by how modern and fabulous we are, and how easy everything can be for us; that’s the gilded glow of technology, and I marvel at it all the time.

The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags – those little checkerboard marks that look like this # – were used to mark phrases or names, in order to make it easier to search for them among the zillions and zillions of tweets.

Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.

There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.