Returns (The Library Trilogy, #1.6)

by Mark Lawrence

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.

Every book is full of endings. Each sentence runs on, growing, building in complexity until its terminal punctuation brings it to a final, inarguable halt. Each chapter is a little death, tension raised, peaked, and released. And before the back cover can be reached, the last page must be crossed. And whether in triumph or sorrow, the story is done.

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.

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.

Some will barely have begun the first line of their story before it ends. But there’s a power in brevity. A short tale can weigh more heavily on the heart than the longest epic. And sometimes a single phrase will echo through eternity.”

Never mistake the idea that something won’t last long, for the notion that it has little value.

“You always get something out of reading a book. It’s a reward in and of itself.”

the difference between charging at one thing, and running away from another, was often so small as to make it impossible to tell one from the other.