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“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.”
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, in a green-spined hardcover that’s right over there, one shelf away, JC179.R, said: You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
“There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”
“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”
“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.”
We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.”
Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.
“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”
from these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs.
That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.
‘He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.’ ”]·
It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. 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.
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.”
In time she ceases to notice the defect in Omeir’s face: it becomes part of the world, no different than the mud of spring, the mosquitoes of summer, or the snows of winter.