Apex Magazine February 2018 Quotes

“The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming 'a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.' I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“I sent him home with The Count of Monte Cristo, partly because it requires your full attention and a flow chart to keep track of the plot and the kid needed distracting, but mostly because of what Edmund says on the second-to-last page: “… all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“I’m not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie on online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March).”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“God save me from the yearners. The insatiable, the inconsolable, the ones who chafe and claw against the edges of the world. No book can save them.

(That’s a lie. There are Books potent enough to save any mortal soul: books of witchery, augury, alchemy; books with wand-wood in their spines and moon-dust on their pages; books older than stones and wily as dragons. We give people the books they need most, except when we don’t.)”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“It wasn’t until I was actually in the F DAC-FEN aisle, holding our dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo in my hand, that I realized Edmund Dantès was absolutely, one-hundred-percent full of shit.
If Edmund had taken his own advice, he would’ve sat in his jail cell waiting and hoping for forty years while the Count de Morcerf and Villefort and the rest of them stayed rich and happy. The real moral of The Count of Monte Cristo was surely something more like: If you screw someone over, be prepared for a vengeful mastermind to fuck up your life twenty years later. Or maybe it was: If you want justice and goodness to prevail in this world, you have to fight for it tooth and nail. And it will be hard, and costly, and probably illegal. You will have to break the rules.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018

“He took The Runaway Prince home and renewed it twice online, at which point a gray pop-up box that looks like an emissary from 1995 tells you, “the renewal limit for this item has been reached.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Apex Magazine Issue 105, February 2018