Returns (The Library Trilogy, #1.6)

by Mark Lawrence

“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.

We can journey to Crath City and to the library, we can put this book on its shelf. We can return the book because it hasn’t changed – but we ourselves can’t return, we can only move forwards like a clockwork toy, because time has us.

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.

“Every book is full of death. Or full of endings at least. There’s no turning back. No returning. You cannot read the same book twice.”

“It’s about pain.” Holden understood it now. Though surely at sixty-two he’d have a new opinion. “It’s about how we’re all rattling through our lives without the least plan, even if we think we have one.