The Archive of the Forgotten

They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.

There is no library of secrets. Secrets cannot be kept or curated. Secrets have no need for a library but each library needs secrets. Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself. Every book is a secret that only readers know.

To be a librarian is to be in rebellion against time, against the world.

Every book carried a scar, a splinter of psyche, that was essential to its need to exist.

Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world.

Letting books take you where they might – that was one part of the Library magic.

Mad . . . now, that’s a peculiar term, and, saints, don’t they love applying it to women. Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world. It’s acceptable to be mad; it’s dangerous to be angry.

Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself. Every book is a secret that only readers know.

What is a story without want, without need? Moreover, what is want, what is need, without a story?

Hold up. Claire had enough narrative sense to recognize a haunting when she saw one. The whispers, the voice, the creepy dream, and now this every-person person. One did not live this long in a library without understanding the clear markers of Suspicious Nonsense. She was not about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like a complete fool.     No, she was about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like an aware fool.

War,” Probity said, and it was caught somewhere between amusement and agony. “Shall we revisit the peacetime burning, then? Libraries censored and burned, the stories that died and were forgotten by accident, by neglect, by ignorance, by—and here, the most notorious peacetime murderer of all—by piety. Books burned because they threatened Bronze Age beliefs and scared old men in long robes. I’m not sure if humans have sacrificed more ink than blood to their gods over the years, but if not, it has to be a near thing.

It smelled like the color thirteen; it felt warm as violet; it whispered cardamom binaries.

Life--it goes on. Change happens. Secrets get out. Challenges appear. Decisions are forced. Whether we're ready for them or not.

When someone decided to hate you, for whatever reason, there was rarely any good in trying to convince them otherwise.

But it wasn’t just the prospect of returning that drew him. It was not the memory of floating spires and air heavy with music. It was the prospect of stopping. Of truly belonging somewhere again. It was the idea of slowing his steps and turning his eyes to a place that saw him, that recognised him, that claimed him. It was that concept, the cessation of motion, that drove his words.

Books were supposed to be shelter from the demons of the world

A reader doesn’t mark his life by days but by memories. A book doesn’t mark its life by pages but by readers.

The heart of any story is a little, tiny sliver of an author’s soul. That’s how any story is made.

Claire has been preoccupied with not drowning in the history of her regret,” Hero said, not ungently.

Maybe the story of humanity is learning to be brave enough to be the character in their own story. Apprentice Librarian Brevity, 2016 CE

The purpose for stories is what readers will make of them. But the reason, the desperate need, is a splinter in the author alone. A good story gets under your skin, because that’s where all good stories start.

Once a book is out in the world, the author pretends to let go. Stories, after all, are for the people who need to hear them. We have to let go of a story, give up the reins, when we ask it to be read. We pretend it’s like making any other product, bread for the hungry or coats for the cold. But what no author admits is that it’s not like that at all. Stories are not made of flour or wool. Stories, real stories, are made with a sliver of yourself.

Stories need a teller. Books need a reader. These unlived lives are nothing without humanity to anchor them, breathe life into the missing parts.

Books were a kind of magic everywhere.

Like any proper storyteller, I have lied.

I guess I should be grateful you lot even know cursive.” “There’s nothing innately better about something just because it’s old,” Brevity said.

If I am to remake the Library, then it follows that I am to remake the librarians as well. No use modeling ourselves after the human equivalent—in my time, the only reason I had the education I did was because of the wealth and status of my family. Even then, I would never have been made a scholar in charge of learning. Scholars are more hungry for control and the blessings of the powerful than for knowledge. So this is my charge: We will be librarians. True to the books, but even more important, dedicated to those who have yet to read them. Understand that our duty does not end at the edge of a page. Stories must serve the living, not the reverse. If knowledge is freedom, then we must be chain breakers. If there’s one thing I learned from the specter of my predecessor, it is this: to be a librarian is to be in rebellion against time, against the world. Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 612 CE

burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.

Humans could create because they could birth little pieces of their souls to do it. Books existed in the afterlife, because the afterlife was a place of immutable things, including souls.