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January 29 - February 3, 2021
I suppose I should aim for the truth, now that there is so very little worth hiding.
The world was a library she could never really read.
Characters are more real than real. That’s what fiction is.
Maybe the story of humanity is learning to be brave enough to be the character in their own story.
Every survivor wore scars and weariness.
“They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.”
“You can’t break something that’s already broken. Stop protecting things you could make better.”
“I think we do the haunting to ourselves. Death keeps its own secrets.”
Stories need a teller. Books need a reader. These unlived lives are nothing without humanity to anchor them, breathe life into the missing parts.
“‘Immortal’ is just a word for something you don’t understand the shape of, yet. The boundaries, the end.”
“No one would really want to be immortal. Forever is an awful long time.”
She would know, and in her knowing, the world would make sense again.
Let me tell you, from someone with lifelong experience owning one, a soul’s not that shiny on the inside.
Life is for the living; leave worrying about souls for the dead.
Souls: pesky, powerful stuff.
A rational creature might at least consider whether any paradise one has to sacrifice others to get into is worth the price of admission.
The song of the books—I thought if I listened long enough they would sing to me too.
The best of humanity can be found in Hell.
Hell is a place for the dreamers that have woken up, and the books still asleep.
Once a book is out in the world, the author pretends to let go. Stories, after all, are for the people who need to hear them.
A good story gets under your skin, because that’s where all good stories start.
We are a cherry blossom, and they are the frost. Frost melts, but it is the blossom that dies.
“A fix that sacrifices someone is no fix at all.”
Forgetting is its own kind of awful magic.
No one is forgotten, and no one is alone.
Panic could be felt without being acted on.
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.
And a life, while also a story, is also something quite different.”
Scholars are more hungry for control and the blessings of the powerful than for knowledge.
Stories must serve the living, not the reverse.
If knowledge is freedom, then we must be chain breakers.
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.
No one could tolerate oblivion alone.
The devil obviously has never met a bibliophile.
Rebellion is in a reader’s blood.
We’re humanity, splintered into the stories we tell ourselves.
Going mad is an excellent defense. Nothing is so discounted, dismissed, as an eccentric woman speaking the truth.
