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What is the worst that could happen? she’d asked herself. You could die, the fear whispered back. What is the best? You could live.
Children made you vulnerable, your heart walking around outside your body.
But she had never wanted to be a wife.
“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.”
I miss you every day, every hour, every minute.
“You only fall in love like that once, and then forever you love with a fractured heart. Healed though it may be.”
“Is your little library not a symbolic beacon to the world that words are more powerful than flames?”
“‘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.
“Good people do bad things, bad people do good things. And most people are just trying to survive.”
“But as I said, 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.”
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.’”
War—and she had decided they were at war—had a way of stripping away all those small things and then amplifying what was left. There were no tiny irritations or minor celebrations. It was all love and hate, fear and courage, poetry and destruction, everything more intense because of the contrast, the middle ground no longer there.
The pen might be able to destroy a nation eventually, but by the time it did, how many bodies would the sword have claimed?
“You can’t control other people’s reactions to your art. You can only control what you produce.”
If Althea had a church, it was within the covers of books; if she had a religion, it was in the words written there.
“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.”
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.
an attack on books, on rationality, on knowledge isn’t a tempest in a teacup, but rather a canary dead in a coal mine.
“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 you.”
It made her think that home might not be a place, but rather a person.
