Ruth Rendell Quotes

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Those who declared librarians obsolete when the Internet rage first appeared are now red-faced. We need them more than ever. The Internet is full of 'stuff' but its value and readability is often questionable. 'Stuff' doesn't give you a competitive edge, high-quality related information does.

Education is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the ability to find it.

That's what librarians do. They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. They were like that way before the Internet came along.

There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.

Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where alphabetical order has gone obsolete. Wikipedia is ostensibly in alphabetical order, but, when you think about it, it's not in any order at all. You use a search engine to get into it.

But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.

Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work - where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

… science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race....

I have, compartmentalized in my head, one file for the NFL, one for college basketball and one for golf. They contain everything I've ever read, watched and learned.

I just have pretty good recall of information.

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.

You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.

Librarians! Librarians always know how to find out things. That was their job even before the Internet.

He also tried to block the doorway when she left him. My mother ducked under his arm, ran to her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was somehow romantic, as it pinpointed the actual memory of my mother's departure, something you don't see a lot of in television. Real people don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend.They don't say, "I'm leaving you, Jack," and fade to a paper towel commercial.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Library Science is the key to all science, just as mathematics is its language - and civilization will rise or fall, depending on how well librarians do their jobs.