Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

“The rules of engagement,” Captain Tom Mudd explained to the irate captain who’d been duped by this ruse, “were invented by men who would benefit most from them.”

He felt wedded to his own shadow of doubt.

Trust is a muscle that works best in reflex.

“Beware the men who call you friend,”

Surely, it was better to go forward into ruin than backward into rot.

“That’s enough,” she said as Pencastle swung back around, cradling his ear. “Just because you don’t recognize mercy doesn’t mean you haven’t been shown it.” “But why must he take my books?” the doctor pleaded, his chin gleaming with spittle, his composure utterly shattered. “Because the Tower has asked for them,” Senlin said.

Was violence clarifying in doses but intoxicating in excess? Could one deal out murder responsibly, even civilly? Was violence, like wine, the midwife of philosophy?

We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are,

No matter how much she gave it, the Tower’s appetite for misery seemed inexhaustible.

Then the colonnade ended, the Silk Gardens opened before them, and they discovered that despite all they had seen, they hadn’t yet exhausted their awe.

There was nothing better for clearing the head than a little adventure.

“It’s easy to judge a life not led.”

If she wanted to carry him to the moon, he’d gladly ride along.

“You don’t really believe that. You just feel guilty. But guilt is not a duty, Tom, no matter how devoted you are to it,”

The origin of a myth is like that of a river. It begins in obscurity as a collection of tentative, unassociated flows. It streams downhill along the path of least resistance, seeking consensus. Other fables join it, and the myth broadens and sets. We build cities on the banks of myth.

It is by studying the Sphinx that we realize all wonder is seasoned with dread, all courage is tinctured with fear, all wisdom is the fermentation of folly.

Senlin found the smell of the books as enthralling as a woman’s perfume.

The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

Books are seldom more than an author elaborating upon their obsession with the grammar of self-doubt. How superior are books to authors! Nothing believes in itself so much as a book; nothing is less bothered by history or propriety. “Begin in my middle,” the book says. “Rifle straight to my end.” What difference does it make? The book comes out of white, empty flyleaves and goes into the same oblivion. And the book is never afraid.

Hope. What is its dimension? How long is it? Where does it lead? When does it become habitual, automatic, the answer not only to doubt, but also to action, and redemption, and living?

Dignity is entirely ephemeral; it is like the dust of a butterfly’s wing. Once shed, it is impossible to recover.

Books are traps. But how are they so, and whom do they trap: the author or the reader? Perhaps they are just the boasts of vainglorious minds, and what we hold up as literature is in fact a cult of unlikable characters.

Myth is the story of what we do not understand in ourselves.

They were like the daily crockery of a public house: They’d been broken and glued back together so many times it was a miracle they retained their shape, a miracle they could still be filled and hold anything inside of them.

Senlin smiled at them and then at Edith, staring out at her ship, glistening like mercury. He wondered if he wasn’t overlooking what he was looking for.