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Language was not a smooth surface—it was a roller coaster, a sponge, a gateway.
Interpretation is a censor’s undoing. It’s the last thing you should ever do.”
since Zorba, many things in his life had changed. Things he didn’t dare mention to anyone, because the last thing a book censor should do is admit his enemy’s virtues. They were probably just tricks, which the enemy used to tempt him. But why did bread suddenly taste as though he’d never had bread before? And why was the air so sweet and pure? Like butterflies shedding cocoons, the extraordinary emerged from hiding. The surface of his humble world was pulled back, exposing tenderness beneath.
He’d come to understand that they weren’t waging a war against books so much as a war against reading. Reading was a bad habit, but you couldn’t keep people from doing it, just as you couldn’t keep them from smoking or having sex. All you could do was limit their options, give them the illusion of choice. Then, all on their own, they would turn away.
the System’s aim was to create a human being who, after a long day’s work, wanted nothing else but to go home.
If it were destroyed, everyone who’d survived in the story would be gone too. There would be no one left to remember the ones who had died. The balance of the world goes horribly askew when a story is confiscated; it becomes a darker, more ominous place.
He ran his fingers over the spines. Tell me who I am! he wanted to scream, but he knew that these books would never give him answers. Only more questions.
His own upbringing at home and at school had taught him that there were three basic, legitimate desires: to belong, to procreate, and to work—everything else was toxic and superfluous.
There was a time when robots were modeled after humans, but now it was the other way around.
need to protect our collective memory. That way, when this world falls, as it’s destined to do, we’ll have somewhere to start from.
It struck him that a book was effectively the equivalent of a human being. But why did he love the strangeness and diversity of the characters and ideas he encountered in books, when the same things bothered him in real life?
