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 Mechanism’s pull was that while a reader’s imagination could animate a book inside their head, the Mechanism would build that world around you. It offered the contents of each book as something to be physically experienced, walked through, partaken in, interrogated, shared. You could immerse yourself in the book in whatever way you might desire.

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

When they were growing up, instead of knowledge, the Assistant had handed them the keys to knowledge. She taught them the languages that would unlock a million books.

People with an abundance of money and spare time turn to fashion.

Kindness carries a weight; it’s a burden all its own when you have nothing.

“None of us really know what we’re here for or what we’re supposed to be doing. So, we shout out, hoping someone will hear, hoping someone will see us and reveal the great secret.”

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.

dragging his guilt behind him. Evar felt like someone who’d been waiting his whole life for something to happen, constantly worried by the fear that it already had, and that he had missed

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. But here it’s the case that the city has grown as much as you have. Ask yourself in the face of the remarkable speed of progress: where did we come from, where are we going, and—most importantly—have we walked this path before?”

We live in the same world but at different times. You will live in my future. I lived in your past.”

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.

most of them think money would change who they are, and that’s the thing: you take yourself with you wherever you go. Money can’t buy a new you. At least that’s what I find.”

secrets always seemed to escape if given space. One person could hold a secret tight to their chest with both hands. When it was two, or three, or four people it was as if that secret had to be tossed back and forth between them, creating

many chances to drop

it’s not the gift of money that’s the greatest—it’s the gift of purpose. He said, and the fancy words are all his: 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.”

‘A circle drawn with the blood of a white one will open the way to the wood,’

“People die, brother. That’s what I’ve learned. Life’s cheap, easily spent. And if there’s any joy to be had it’s in the moments between. So, when you find something that makes you happy you take it with both hands, and you hold on to it for as long as you can. It’s not going to last. It will be taken from

you. But that’s not the point. The point is that you took your chance, you drank the wine, you took what good you could from the world, and you gave it yours.”

you can’t step into the same river twice.

“We’re all the story we tell about ourselves,

The two represented differing extremes of an argument in which two parties, each believing itself correct, sought to plot a path for intelligence to circumvent its self-destructive nature. And as a consequence, in perhaps the primal irony, intelligence fought intelligence.