Para (wanderer)

“Don’t you ever reread a book you liked?” Once the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them; there were plenty of people who didn’t read for pleasure, let alone reread.
But Tom smiled and shook his head. “I used to, when I was a tyke. But how can you read a book you’ve already read when you know there are all those other ones out there?”
“An excellent argument, Mr. McLaury. I can only defend my position by saying that I use my old books as seasoning for the new ones—I sprinkle them lightly through my reading.”
― Emma Bull, Territory

“It is not cynical to admit that the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and vision and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice!”
― Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx

“Sever all ties. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories

“I have breathed on shadows, as one breathes into a soap bubble, to give it breadth and life. I did it because I had to, because human beings cannot live without history, and I have no history or tradition that is not located in a pale, aggressive body lying in the dirt, or hanging from a tree. How cruel it is to live in a community of two. I used to crouch on the floor, with my bedroom door open a crack so that I could peer out, and watch the lamplight on his motionless shoulders as he read, just to feel that another person was alive. I stole his papers in order to feel that I was not alone. I went through his cabinet. (I found nothing there but pencils, lamp oil, and thread.) I read all his books and tried, in my clumsy way, to debate them with him. What is the difference between a genius and a monster?”
― Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories