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“The soldiers who are dying for us. They need to be told what to read?”
Roosevelt was a vocal supporter of both the Council on Books in Wartime and its wildly successful initiative that every month shipped millions of paperback novels to the boys serving overseas.
“Die Bücherfreundin.” “‘A friend of books,’”
“It felt like we were playacting, perhaps? Hitler had just been named chancellor, and things went very bad, very quickly.
Hannah knew the assault should strengthen her resolve, make her want to take up a sword. But every day that passed, she was less and less certain the world really was worth saving.
“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.”
Americans were exhausted from caring about too many things.
Hadn’t understood that pretty words whispered like promises could be nothing but empty lies.
Girls were taught how to catch boys, not how to protect themselves from them.
“No,” Hannah said softly. “You only fall in love like that once, and then forever you love with a fractured heart. Healed though it may be.”
kintsugi?” Hannah shook her head. “In Japan, when a piece of pottery breaks, the pieces are put back together using gold at the cracks,” Natalie said. “That way the broken object is even more beautiful than the original.”
Everyone had strong opinions about politics, it seemed. Althea sometimes wished she could just ignore it all, but that was proving nearly impossible.
Then they were off to talk to another group, to lament curfews and club closings and the lack of coffee in stores.
Had she gotten this all wrong?
He looked like what a Byron poem sounded like.
Tortilla Flat was one of our earlier books.” “Haven’t read it,” Hale said, not defensive as some were when she dropped names of novels. “Camelot in California, replete with a merry band of knights,” she said. “I enjoyed it enough.”
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!’?”
“Don’t you want to see life as it should be rather than how it is?”
“I have to warn you, though, people are on their last leg in terms of caring about . . . well . . . anything beyond surviving.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels,”
“‘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.’”
“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.”
“‘Even the darkest night will end.’”
everyone seemed ready to march to the barricade to fight for liberty. It was sweet, but it also made Althea feel old and cynical.
It is not failure we should fear but inaction.
it was the responsibility of those who remembered the deceased to carry on his goodness.
Time certainly had a way of obscuring reality, of putting a rose-colored tinge on troubling behavior.
It had been such a long war, so many years of hardship, of sacrifice, of fear and loss and pain and the dull monotony of helplessness. But none of that had crushed them completely. 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 if they could all hold on to those reminders, if they could help each other create them, maybe together they would be able to make it through this godforsaken war. Not necessarily whole, but human.
All Hitler had to do was make people afraid: There is a monster out there who will attack you if you don’t let me protect you.”
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia
“It seems as though we have been waiting for this day for weeks, and dreading it, and now all emotion is drained away.”
Hitler had been installed as chancellor because the moderates had thought they could control him.
There was no real right answer to her question, because they were all the right answer.
Not about loving them forever, but remembering that there was and will always be something once upon a time that made the person love the other.”
“Few people have to watch their country die,” Hannah said, her lyrical voice all the more captivating because she spoke softly. Althea found herself leaning toward her, and she imagined the rest of the audience was no different. “I have had that dubious privilege, and 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
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they loved their own beliefs more. And that kind of love? It can rot a person from the inside. Can rot a country from the inside.”
“It’s sacrilege,” Althea whispered. If Althea had a church, it was within the covers of books; if she had a religion, it was in the words written there.
Even in the darkest times, though, there is always light to be found.
