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.

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.

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.

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 about the words. The ideas. Not the object.

“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.”

Someone had once told her that we are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.

“Very few people are the author of their own story. Perhaps we’re all characters someone else is writing. Maybe in this world there are characters in books who exist in their own world and consider themselves as real as the people who wrote them.