More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
a cultural program designed to bring “well-known and respected authors” of German origin back to their home country for six-month residencies, she couldn’t help but feel like a fraud. Not only because she still hadn’t come to terms with the idea of herself as a real writer, but because she’d never thought of herself as anything but American.
beginnings of propaganda and nationalism?
“Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.”
this is why I love books
The men who sought violence didn’t understand that while swords could destroy bodies, a pen could destroy a nation.
True, words have a far deeper and broader impact than weapons.....
There was power in claiming—deliberately and with joy—a part of you that others wanted you to hate yourself for.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? . . . Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!’?”
The way to judge people wasn’t to look at how they acted toward people they wanted to impress; it was to look at the way they treated those who could do nothing for them.
I tell my students this allllll the time
“Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. And most people are just trying to survive.”
facts!!!
words cannot be unwritten simply because you burn them. Ideas cannot simply be erased. People cannot be erased.”
“Burning books about things you do not like or understand does not mean those things no longer exist.”
“Nazis are portrayed in propaganda as ignorant anti-intellectuals. But the leaders know just how powerful knowledge is. That’s why they want to control it so strictly.”
knowledge is power.....limit access to knowledge and people are easily controlled
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book.’”
this is why I love books so much.....
“We need the kind of fire that lives in him. But if we burn the world down to destroy the Nazis . . .” Hannah finished his thought. “There will be no world left to live in when they’re gone.”
May his memory be a blessing, Brigitte had said. In Jewish tradition, that meant it was the responsibility of those who remembered the deceased to carry on his goodness.
the best way to remember those we have lost
No character was ever completely good or evil, but rather they were made up of a number of traits. Those traits plus the choices they made defined what role they played in the story.
same with people in real life
Only few traits were inherently bad. Cowardice had to be one of them.
The success of the ASEs proved that sharing the secret was so much more powerful than hoarding it close to her chest. In doing so, the thread of humanity that ran between all of them tightened, strengthened, became all the more vibrant for the worlds and emotions and journeys that every reader experienced together. It didn’t take knowing a soldier personally for Viv to reach out into the night and know someone else in the world was finding solace in the very words she was reading at that very moment. It was like looking up at the moon and feeling a connection to anyone who was touched by its
...more
words, stories, books....the connection us across time, culture, religion, and language
Even in the darkest days, in their deepest grief, at their most exhausted, humans found a way to create moments that were so fundamentally hopeful that they couldn’t help but inspire you to take one more step forward. And then one more.
hope is what sets humans apart from animals....
Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
“The good fight isn’t always about winning. Sometimes it’s a reminder to the world that there are people out there who are willing to try.”
absolutely true!
I can tell you that it comes not as a rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious as anything I’ve ever seen. It can start with rumblings about an unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will threaten your family, your children. It can deepen with each disdainful remark about science and art and literature in a pub on a Friday night. It comes cloaked in patriotism and love of country, and uses that as armor against any criticism.
God that's so so similar to today....
The moment the most educated country in the world willingly, joyously, wholeheartedly turned away from knowledge.”
“I can tell you that banning books, burning books, blocking books is often used as a way to erase a people, a belief system, a culture,” Hannah said. “To say these voices don’t belong here, even when those writers represent the very best of a country.
men who crave power use fear and panic that’s incited by certain ideas to get what they want,”
“We cannot stop individuals who read for the sole purpose of confirming their already closely held beliefs.” She enunciated each word, a delicate fist pounding on the podium. “But we can stop the dictators, the tyrants, the bullies who try to impose that method onto others. This may feel insignificant, this moment here, in this room, talking about a single amendment to a bill that was drafted with the best intentions. I can tell you, though, that history is built on moments that feel insignificant. We didn’t know that night of the book burnings that the event was anything special. We pictured
...more
every moment has the potential to be important, it's what you do or dont do that lasts
an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.
attacking knowledge leads to the death of humanity
“There are moments in life when you have to put what is right over what party you vote for. And if you can’t recognize those moments when the stakes are low—let me assure you, you won’t recognize them when the stakes are high. Thank
voting is about what's best for humanity, not just a party line
books were not just books. They were stories that helped the exhausted men overseas remember what they were fighting for—freedom of thought, American values, antifascist sentiment.
It wasn’t always that strength of character was inherent at birth. Sometimes it came through strife and struggle and failure. Sometimes it came through growth.
