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It was a strange moment in history to be a politician, when you were sending the nation’s boys to their death while enjoying steak and whiskey lunches on the taxpayers’ tab.
As she often did when she was flustered, Althea tried to imagine she was writing instead of living this scene. What would she do if she were the main character instead of the dowdy friend there simply to add contrast, if she were Lizzy Bennet instead of Charlotte Collins?
But there was something about the market—shoulders brushed against hers, faces turned with absent half smiles, children pulled at the hem of her coat. Rather than being caught in an avalanche, uncontrolled and terrifying, Althea was just a single snowflake in a storm that was so much larger than herself.
“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.”
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.
“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.’” It was as if someone had taken Viv’s life and bottled it into a simple quote.
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.
Viv didn’t take any extra time, simply pinned her hair back from her face, shrugged into a simple white shirt and gray skirt, and smudged on lipstick, smearing some of the color into her cheeks so she didn’t appear deathly pale.
She couldn’t help but think of Heinrich Heine’s prediction. Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
If we take away books, what are they left with? Nightmares, and that’s it.” “They’ll still have nightmares,” Althea said in that way that made it clear she had her own. “Yes,” Viv agreed. “But at least that’s not all they’ll have.”
Her better angels had her agreeing with him. The devil on her shoulder wanted her to verbally stomp all over this man who’d become her nemesis.
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.
