Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”