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

by Mark Lawrence

…similarly impermanent. All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written. The greatest story can reach the stars…

“And like the branches of a tree, language forks and forks again until the common root is barely a whisper. Those branches spread and touch distant lands where strange tongues reshape both words and grammar, and where strange hands find new alphabets in which to trap new sounds. And that’s just for books from our world.”

“There are worlds upon worlds upon worlds. An infinity of languages so opaque to us that we can see no further than the ink upon the page. Languages we must chip away at for each scintilla of understanding.

Just as the trees of ancient forests fell and became buried and compacted by each subsequent generation, covered over, buried ever deeper until the crushing pressure of untold fathoms changed their structure into coal, history itself became buried by the flood of years and crystallised into myth.