The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

“There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application.”

The hate was in her belly, an unfamiliar sharp-angled lump of feeling that was at once both fire and ice, something heavy and uncomfortable and yet a thing that she wouldn’t put down even if she were able to.

The mountain devoured the sun and they walked on in growing darkness.

There are moments in life when you know with a great and unshakeable certainty that everything will change.

“Folks these days don’t have time for gods. Progress is the new deity.”

The fact he didn’t try to hide his weakness made her trust him more. Not much, but more.

Her Aunt Teela had offered little by way of wisdom about the world but one maxim she often repeated was: There’s always a price.

Kindness carries a weight; it’s a burden all its own when you have nothing. Some undeniable part of Livira wanted to bite the hands that offered so much so freely. Pride is stupid, pride is blind, but pride is also the backbone that runs through us: without pride there’s no spring-back, no resilience.

Like all hunters, sorrow advances on slow, silent feet, until the last moment when it attacks from cover, springing with such speed that the impact rocks its victim on their heels.

Conversations of any worth only seemed to happen on the sharp edge of things,

Some silences stretch, the tension builds and builds again until the suddenness of the inevitable snap. That’s the quiet which lies between people.

It turned out that all she’d ever needed in order to behave herself was a total absence of boredom.

She was having enough difficulty hitting the target without being told it was moving.

Livira found herself marvelling at the smooth baldness of the man’s scalp in contrast to the explosive bushiness of his eyebrows.

Scent is a peg on which memories are hung.

They say that you can never go back—and that’s true. We change and so the places we return to will not seem the same.

“In you I see a spark like no other, and when you’re grown, I hope it will become such a light that it will show us a way out.”

Livira’s experience had been that things people don’t want you to talk about are generally true.

“That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Evar said. “And as my brother Mayland was fond of saying, that’s a law that scales swiftly. A lot of knowledge is a very dangerous thing. A man who knows how to sharpen a stick can stab his neighbour to death. That’s a little knowledge for you. But Clovis knows about weapons that can level continents and leave nothing save dust. And Mayland knew about wars in which that actually happened.”

Few things are worse enemies of civilisation than a corrupt official, but an honest official of corrupt laws is definitely one of them. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes, by Juvenal

The histories were dry, the fiction as if someone had pulled a still-beating heart from its cage of ribs and left it pulsing crimson on the page. Somehow the stories that never happened, ones that merely sprang from the dreaming of some long-dead author, were more true than the histories that might be found on the opposite shelf.

All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.

“We deal in affirmation. People don’t want truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them.

All of us in our secret hearts, in our empty moments of contemplation, stumble into the understanding that nothing matters. There’s a cold shock of realisation and, in that moment, we know that nothing at all is of the least consequence. Ultimately, we’re all just spinning our wheels, seeking to avoid pain until the clock winds down and our time is spent. To give someone purpose is to free them, however briefly, from the spectre of that knowledge.”

“Hurts don’t stop, but they fade into shadows of what they were. That’s sad. That something so vital, something that bit you so deep, can be eroded by time into a story that almost seems like it happened to someone else. Any hurt. The years have taken away her meaning. It lessens us.”

It’s in the nature of humans to want to belong to a group, to want to be accepted, appreciated, and needed. What is most frightening about their kind are the sacrifices they are prepared to make in order to become part of such a tribe, clique, sect, sewing circle, cult, or book club. Reason and morality are often at the top of the list of what must be surrendered as part of the club fees. Truth becomes a collective property, an adaptable shield used to shelter the in-group from those outside. Dogs, on the other hand, are great. Training Your Labrador, by Barbara Timberhut

“Everything is a compromise. There are no absolutes in life. There is only one absolute, and it lies beyond us.”

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. This old truism becomes more interesting when one considers how it scales. Is a lot of knowledge a very, very dangerous thing? In Figure 46, knowledge is plotted along the X-axis, and danger along the Y-axis. It’s immediately obvious from the resulting curve that . . . Charting the Ephemeral, by Dr. J. Evans Pilchard,

“One of the earliest philosophers told us you can’t step into the same river twice. The library taught me you can’t read the same book twice either—you’re the river.”

very dear friend of mine. Elias, when not consumed with his scientific research, captained his own great vessel out on the Black Sea. He was often wont to speculate on any and all particulars relating to the nature of time. His insights wandered from commentary on the first accurate chronometers that permitted navigation of the oceans, to the vagaries of both arrivals and of meetings, which are, he always claimed, governed by an arithmetic more fundamental than that of particles, planets, or pulsars. Great Sailing Ships of History: An Architectural Comparison, by A. E. Canulus

“Hello,” she said, her smile a fragile, careworn thing.

“Starval says oversharing is the best cover for secrets. If people believe you could no more hold a secret than a hot stone, then they won’t pry.”