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October 19 - October 27, 2021
When someone decided to hate you, for whatever reason, there was rarely any good in trying to convince them otherwise.
Brevity chewed on her lip. “Humans do a lotta terrible things during war—” “War,” Probity said, and it was caught somewhere between amusement and agony. “Shall we revisit the peacetime burning, then? Libraries censored and burned, the stories that died and were forgotten by accident, by neglect, by ignorance, by—and here, the most notorious peacetime murderer of all—by piety. Books burned because they threatened Bronze Age beliefs and scared old men in long robes. I’m not sure if humans have sacrificed more ink than blood to their gods over the years, but if not, it has to be a near thing.”
As if books are all that’s needed to make a library. My people, we know libraries. Stories are more than ink on pages. Libraries are more than scrolls stacked upon shelves. There is something untold here.
Knowledge purifies. We serve no one with ignorance.
“Without a boundary that marks beginning and end, what matter would anything have? I reckon life inside a jar is special because of what it is under glass. Break the glass and nothing’s destroyed, but everything changes.”
“Nothing more practical than loss. It’s a natural product of time,”
The written and the writer are the same, after all.”
Humans turned to paper and stories in the end, given enough time.
It’s acceptable to be mad; it’s dangerous to be angry. The secret is that I am both.
“Tea. Why is it always blasted tea? Where’re the realms with magical coffee elixirs? Wine? A decent sherry? At least Valhalla had ale.”
Life is for the living; leave worrying about souls for the dead.
The best of humanity can be found in Hell. I’ll fight any theologian on this fact. Hell is a place you sentence yourself to, which by necessity requires a solid bit of self-reflection. Or, at the very least, a death’s-bed awareness. Mortality has a way of forcing one to be honest with oneself; none of the frivolous barricades we erect in life withstand it. You find the failures here, but you also find the strivers, the yearners, the eyes open enough to see the distance between where they are and where they could have been. Hell is a place for the dreamers that have woken up, and the books
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he’d choose to fall. As if anyone chooses gravity.
I still hold that this is the worst idea.” She was halfway to the shelves when Hero muttered, barely audibly, “All our best options usually are.”
Every book is a secret that only readers know.
to be a librarian is to be in rebellion against time, against the world.
A reader doesn’t mark his life by days but by memories. A book doesn’t mark its life by pages but by readers. We are made up of those whom we touch.
The devil obviously has never met a bibliophile. Rebellion is in a reader’s blood.
Stories are slivers of us, all of us. What makes a story real is the soul of the author.
“The heart of any story is a little, tiny sliver of an author’s soul. That’s how any story is made.”
“Everyone looks for themselves in story.”
Maybe what makes a library isn’t what it has, but what it does.
