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

by Mark Lawrence

Livira studied her unexpected prize. It looked half-finished, the mass of fibres compressed towards the middle seeming like just a clotting of many threads that wove nothing. But as she rotated the ball a shape emerged within it, still vague, like a man approaching through a dust storm, indistinct but definitely there. A young man or maybe a boy. Though if asked how she could tell his age or sex, Livira would have no answer. And it seemed to her that she knew him, or rather that she recognised him.

there, where there had been no title or decoration, ghostly lines held the remnants of the light that had spilled from her eyes. Within the faint outline of a circle lay a thousand barely visible lines, scrawled without purpose, a tangle, the mass of them growing denser towards the centre. And out of that chaos a shape might be imagined, a figure, a person walking towards Evar as if emerging from the smoke of some unseen fire.

The book’s cover now bore an image of a person bound by a thousand threads—defined by those threads. Possibly it was one unbroken line, a single string that could be straightened out leaving no trace of the figure it seemed to reveal.

She wrote her name. Names were all well and good but what fascinated her was that her thoughts could spill out onto the page and somehow be trapped in these marks, like frozen speech, waiting as long as you liked for someone to release it with their eyes.

Secrets should never be held too closely, for a secret that is clung to will shape its keeper and in that twisting of their being it will reveal itself.

The assistants would never allow any of the works Jella and her colleagues produced to be placed on the shelves—such interlopers would be found and destroyed with the same casual wave of a white hand that had once turned Livira’s apple to dust and pips. The book copies that Jella and the others produced must, however, appear to have come from the library if they were to be taken seriously in the city, and so their covers were tooled, illuminated, and subsequently aged to convey the necessary gravitas.

Livira had come to appreciate that an ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you.

while generations of librarians had ostensibly been cataloguing the collection to make it accessible, they had in fact been turning it into a vast puzzle, a lock whose key was held by those in power. A lock that kept them in power.

Few things are worse enemies of civilisation than a corrupt official, but an honest official of corrupt laws is definitely one of them.

He spread his arms, looked up at the night sky, and made a slow turn, whirling the stars above him along orbits of his own decree.

And having lived his life within the confines of a library Evar knew that endings were important.

The main comfort in maintaining a journal is not that those who come after you may read through the progress of your life. Nor is it that, however faded, flexible, and fallible your memory may become as the tide of years washes over it, you will have this record to look back upon. It lies primarily in the illusion that were you only to press on at the end of this Tuesday and write your way into Wednesday, you would become the master of your life, subject to no bounds save those of imagination. The Journals of Samantha Peeps, by Samantha Peeps

“I’ll be happy when I see her climb down, get to the foot of the tower, and find she’s anchored to her bed by her hair.” “She cuts it off then, idiot, and she’s free. That’s the purpose of the story. To say that you can escape from somewhere but you’re always going to leave part of yourself there.”