The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2)

by A.J. Hackwith

When someone decided to hate you, for whatever reason, there was rarely any good in trying to convince them otherwise.

Not even death stops the world from expecting a woman to take care of things.

“There’s nothing innately better about something just because it’s old,”

Humans were always evolving new ways of not saying what they meant.

Humans are the only mortal creatures that compose such ways to express desire, want, regret. Expression of the way things should be, or never were. That’s a very human skill.

“What? I’m an atheist.” “Atheist?” Rami was aghast. “You literally live in Hell. You have met literal gods.”

“I never cared for the puritan notion of policing a man’s thoughts. I think the weight of a man’s life lies in what he does with it. Reasons and heart are important, but it’s your actions that have long-reaching effects.”

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 still asleep. In both ways, Hell is a place ripe for stories.

Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself. Every book is a secret that only readers know.