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You cannot read the same book twice. When you return to the first page it will be a different “you”, changed by the very experiences you are seeking to recapture.
“You would be well advised to keep this heresy to yourself, Heeth. But bookshelves are a graveyard. Your teachers might tell you that the Library is a temple to the written word, a cathedral of books. But it’s a tomb. The authors of those books wrote them to be read, not to rot – however slowly – on the shelf. We librarians, we preserve books. We treat them as something holy. Each with its precise place in some great plan we’re writing. There are few worse crimes in our lore than a broken spine, a dogeared page. But the men and women, the souls, the … things … that wrote those books cared
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the destruction of a book is a price well worth paying if the alternative is keeping it unread in perfect safety.”
“People are like books that are loaned out with blank pages and it’s the job of the world to fill in the story. Maybe that story will get read a page here, paragraph there, a line exchanged on a doorstep with a stranger. With luck most of it will be shared with someone precious. But however many people read whatever part of it – even those who read the same pages – every one of them will come away with a different tale. And no one, save the person it’s about, will read the whole story.
There is in the possibility of loss, and in every transient second of existence, a value and a beauty that cannot be seen from without. Never mistake the idea that something won’t last long, for the notion that it has little value. Rejoice in the temporary,
Someone had once told her that we are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.
“You always get something out of reading a book. It’s a reward in and of itself.”
