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It doesn’t matter how many schools the Nazis close, he would say to them. Each time someone stops to tell a story and children listen, a school has been established.
Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology—whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law—have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.
Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That’s not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk—whose legs shake, but who carry on.”
Adults wear themselves out pointlessly searching for a joy they never find. But in children, it bursts out of every pore.
Sometimes, no matter how much you want it, being the fastest isn’t an option, because your legs aren’t as long or your lungs as large. But you can always choose to be the strongest. It’s up to you—your willpower and your effort. I’m not going to ask you to be the fastest, but I am going to require you to be the strongest.”
Within their pages, books contain the wisdom of the people who wrote them. Books never lose their memory.”
“Miss Adler … books know everything.”
her life can be made much more profound, because books multiply your experiences and enable you to meet people
Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.
Novels add what’s missing to life.”
book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.
“The Nazis can strip us of our homes, our belongings, our clothes, and even our hair, but no matter how much they take away from us, they can’t remove our hope. It’s ours. We can’t lose it.
War is like an overflowing river: It’s hard to control and, if you put up a small barrier, it only gets swept along in its path.
When they’re lined up, the books form a tiny row, a modest display of veterans. But over these past few months, they’ve enabled hundreds of children to walk through the geography of the world, get close to history, and learn math. And also to become drawn into the intricacies of fiction and amplify their lives many times over. Not bad for a handful of old books.
Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk
A book is like a loaf of bread made with yeast, and it continues to expand from within. It is alive as long as someone’s gaze converts the sheets of paper into emotions.
