The Library Trilogy Quotes

“Nostalgia is the best and the worst feeling - complex - nothing has the ability to so delight and wound us simultaneously, except perhaps for love.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“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.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Hurts don't stop, but they fade into the 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.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“…Relationships were as much a part of people as water was a part of blood. Without water, blood was just a red dust.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Did you ever meet someone clever who was truly happy?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Malar had said that she wouldn't take the side of the book-burners, no matter what the larger argument might be. And now this assistant expected to let not just any old book be destroyed, but the one and only one that she had written herself. If she had bled upon the pages and written every word in crimson the bundle she held to her breastbone could be no more part of herself. To erase her stories, the thoughts and passions, the tears that had fallen and take them utterly from the world... She tried to losen her grip on the covers. She felt foolish but also unableto let it go. Despite the vastness of the library and its unmissable message that books were as common and as numerous as grains of sand on a beach, still she had always felt that the combination of ink, quill and hand had given her thoughts a kind of immortality, that would outlast her flesh and wait the milennia on library shelves, occassionally being discovered and rediscovered by intrepid explorers. Maybe her ideas would even find another mind in which they echoed and took on weight as the reader wrapped pieces of his own sould around the pieces of hers that rested on the page, as they had with Evar.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Malar had said that she wouldn't take the side of the book-burners, no matter what the larger argument might be. And now this assistant expected to let not just any old book be destroyed, but the one and only one that she had written herself. If she had bled upon the pages and written every word in crimson the bundle she held to her breastbone could be no more part of herself. To erase her stories, the thoughts and passions, the tears that had fallen and take them utterly from the world.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“The urge to record was nearly as old as memory itself. What was life if not a song sung to the music of the past for the future to hear?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“He could hear her voice in his mind, asking him why he was still waiting for his life to begin. All his years of caution, all those years when she had asked him
seemingly every day what he thought he was getting ready for. Those days when she'd told him that the race had already started, and he needed to join in or be left behind. Livira’s advice would be, and always had been, to grab what was before him with both hands. And now she would be saying that if he really had for so long been saving himself for something better, something extraordinary... how was this not it?”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“Memory should perhaps be an art, not the blunt refusal to surrender a single moment of experience, but a curation in which consideration is given to what has space on the shelves and what is consigned to the midden.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy

“The library teaches us how to do this. Over and over again it has taught us enough to know how to burn our world to the bedrock, but not enough to stop us from doing so. There's a point that all societies reach.”
― Mark Lawrence, The Library Trilogy