Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)

by Josiah Bancroft

The play took place in a mansion, so the set spanned multiple rooms and included a dining hall, a study, a kitchen, and a dozen other domestic spaces. There were only four characters in the play: a wealthy husband and wife named Kerrick and Alice Mayfair, a young business apprentice named Oscar Shaw, and Isaac, the butler—his role in the farce.

Inevitably, invariably, eventually you will discover you are unprepared to make an informed choice. When in doubt, say, Yes. Yes is the eternal passport. Yes is the everlasting coin.

“Instinct is the fuel that fires the engine of civilization. Generations have labored to build and perfect the engine. Each of you, I hope, will spend your life working to preserve it. Because without it, we would be dangerous beasts.”

impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you’re not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it’s unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries. And if I could, I would give you a hundred pianos. I would …”

“I am upset because we have pooled our human genius into the building of an elaborate Tower and have filled it up with the same tyrants that have plagued our race since we crawled from the sea. Why does our innovation never extend to our conscience?”

Often the simplest way to unlock a door is to knock upon it.

The truth, when finally told, will often sound strange, while a lie is so often familiar.

Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin

Senlin laughed, startling Adam. “That’s what all my friends say.”

I work to pay the man who works me.

“What does the key open?” the Red Hand asked in his distracted, almost dreamy way. Senlin cleared his muddy throat. He teetered on his feet and said without inflection, “You.”

HE ATE THAT

I’m going to feel very weak, and you’re going to feel very dumb. But that’s how it always is in the beginning. Learning starts with failure.”