Building Links With Quality Directories
The first question that comes to mind after reading the title is -
“Does Google still consider directory links as quality?”
I would like to say that - “YES” , it still does if the directory is old, its PR is not inflated by way of buying links, it has appropriate category for your niche, it has good amount of quality contents and over-all the category you are looking to list is recently indexed! 
Ooops - so many things!
Second question that struck is - how do I find quality web directories that would give me links counted by Google?
IMO - this is the most difficult answer to give even for Matt Cutts! In a world obsessed by the green pixel on the Google toolbar, webmasters and SEO industry is just hooked to the Google trick that makes webmastering, seoing or simply browsing the net more interesting.
Far too long Google tolerated a monsterous link market where webmasters were buying and selling link based on Page Rank and thereby successfully manipulating SERPs without giving a damn on Google’s webmaster guideline on quality. But those days are over. In the last quarter of 2007, Google came down heavily on those though the market is still vibrant beneath the surface i.e. underground. But the message has been delivered and heard loud and clear. Big Daddy has penalized all and sundry - directories, blogs, open source development sites (aka Linux) and took away all that important tool-bar green pixels.
One does not have to be Einstein to understand the relation between Page Rank, SERP and SEOing. In those days, one just had to buy a domain, host it, install an easily available directory script, buy few sitewide links from high PR sites and got PR5/6 with internal pages too having high PR. Then promote it on webmaster forums and blogs and the $$$s poured into his/her Paypal account.
No longer! Along with stripping sites of their homepage PR, Google has found a way to hide the PR of inner-pages too even for the old, content rich and trusted directories like botw.org and Yahoo Directory. Thia has made the job of webmasters and SEO experts difficult and has provided a level playing field for those small directory owners who look to build quality websites/directories with contents.
So a quality directory these days does not mean having PR on inner-pages/category pages. But the quality depends on how frequent is the site crawled, indexed and how much content it offers to normal visitors except webmasters and SEO experts. As they say, “content is the king”.
A quality directory should not only consist of listing websites on various categories, but it should also provide real quality contents to visitors.
So look for those type of web directories and you get a quality link even from web directories.