Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

“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.”

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

“Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”

“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.”

a story is a way of stretching time.

how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere,

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

Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

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

Why ·[did I leave?]·? Why this compulsion to be ·[elsewhere?]·, to constantly seek something new?

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.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”

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