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.

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.

The importance of ‘between’ is often overlooked in the hurry of getting from one place to another. In truth it is these interstitial spaces, which, in their linking of this to that and of now to then, might be considered a more fundamental layer in reality’s manifold.

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.

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 realization 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.’ He paused, as if realizing that his words had carried him away, then shrugged. ‘It is what it is.’

What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. Nostalgia is a drug, a knife. Against young skin it carries a dull edge, but time will teach you that nostalgia cuts – and that it’s a blade we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.’