Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”

“You came, didn’t you? You left your life, your school, your students, and you came to the Tower. You brought money, I suppose? You spent more than you could afford, perhaps? You brought your little fortune to the Tower and laid it on the altar, you and scores of other men and women like you. Can you really not imagine why someone would write such glamorous lies?”

“The origin of a myth is like that of a river. It begins in obscurity as a collection of tentative, unassociated flows. It streams downhill along the path of least resistance, seeking consensus. Other fables join it, and the myth broadens and sets. We build cities on the banks of myth.”

Ah, this is the devil of writing in ink! A pencil allows one to speculate and retract, to play a card and then renege. But ink immortalizes gestures and moods and muttered truths. If pencils were all we had, I suspect there would be far fewer books.