Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“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.”

A voice inside his head whispers, You are alone and it’s probably your fault, and the daylight wanes.

We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.

“It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.”

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”

Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do?

Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite.

The devils there, the teamster said, would cut the man every morning, many thousands of times, but the cuts were just small enough that they would not kill him. All day the wounds would dry, and scab over, and the next morning, just as the cuts began to heal, they were opened up again.

Omeir is so tired. It will be a relief to die.

You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’ ”

Erasure is always stalking us, you know?

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

“In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”

But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

“The world as it is is enough.”

Time: the most violent war engine of all.

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.