Letter to a Future Lover Quotes

“Throughout history libraries have testified to what a civilization meant, or wanted to believe it meant.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Ask kin-tsugi, the Japanese art of "golden joinery," in which a broken bowl is fixed and seamed with glow, cracks to the forefront, filled in by gold, rendering the repaired thing more remarkable, honoring its shatter. The result is neither broken nor unbroken, but both at once, shadow, object, corona around an eclipsed sun.

Own the ways we break, it seems to say: understand that the fault lines of a mind or body are individual, and honor them.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Who taught you to swear first? Who burst your head wide open with a sentence? Whose linguistic tics have you ingested, do you know, bust out without thinking”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Like mirror script, to read requires reflection, asks us to see ourselves holding the page.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“I suspect you knew: to live is to be irradiated. It is a sacrifice, this life.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries

“Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.”
― Ander Monson, Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries