Ink and Bone (The Great Library, #1)

by Rachel Caine

women must be instructed by the more developed minds of men to ensure they do not wrongly interpret the riches that the Library offers. For a perversion of knowledge is surely worse than a lack of it.

Everyone kept a record of the days and hours of their lives to be archived in the Library upon their deaths. The Library was a kind of memorial, in that way. It was one reason the people loved it so, for the fact that it lent them a kind of immortality.

There are three parts to learning: information, knowledge, and wisdom. A mere accumulation of information is not knowledge, and a treasure of knowledge is not, in itself, wisdom.

So much should never be held in the hands of so few, for it is a natural, venal habit of men to hold to power. And knowledge is the purest form of power.

But there is no wisdom without knowledge, no progress without danger, and I am not the Library’s child! I must acquire my own information, build my own knowledge, and, through experience, transform it to the treasured gold of wisdom.

“Destroying what offends them, and never mind legacy.”

“Not all knowledge is books. Those out there, they’re history in stone. Men carved them. Men sweated in this sun to put them there, to make their city more beautiful. Who are you to say what’s worthy for men to see today, or tomorrow?” “You’re an irreligious bastard,” Portero said. “I knew you would be.” “I’m as good a Catholic as you,” Jess said. “I just don’t hold with making the world into copies of what I like.”

the Library now seeks not to enlighten, but to enslave.

He was understanding in an entirely new way what Wolfe had been trying to teach them . . . that the Library was not just the bloodless work of making vast stores of information available to the masses; it was defending that information against this. Death. War. Destruction. It

“The Library isn’t a person. It doesn’t have a conscience, or a heart or a soul. It does what it has to do to survive!”

Wolfe seemed to have changed, but Jess was starting to realize that he’d just seen him wrong all along.

Faith. Faith in what? He’d believed in the Library, the ideal of it, anyway. He’d believed that it was doing good, and more, that it wanted to do good. But now he’d seen the dirty underside, and he couldn’t hold on to his faith much longer.