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Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.
“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.
September closes around August like the pincers of a claw,
The heart heals but never completely.
“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”
Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.
Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?
All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.
In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
“The world as it is is enough.”
sometimes his recollections of the siege on the city seem no more than the residue of bad dreams, lifting into consciousness for a moment before dissipating. Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.
