The Book That Wouldn’t Burn

It's always the books you don't have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones on your shelf. They can wait.

All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.

All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written.

There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application.

People don’t want truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them.

an ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you. The art of learning was in selection,

Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.

What does nostalgia mean to a child? An abstraction. A standing stone waiting for them in the mist. Walk a path across some decades, any path you like, and the word will gather weight. It will come to you trailing maybes and might-have-beens. 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 that we cannot keep from applying to our own flesh.

You can’t go back. Time is a river and there’s no swimming against it. You can’t go back. Yesterday does not wait for you. The past is on fire. What you find when you return to it will be ashes.

The person who finished writing it was very different from the one who started it.

It unsettled her how the same words could mean such different things to different people. How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.

But there was something about the number of choices that paralysed him. Rather like when it came to choosing a new book from the stacks. The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read. There must be diamonds out there, the best book in a thousand, the best book in a million, and surely he didn’t want to waste his time reading one that was merely adequate when he could be reading one of those diamonds? So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.

They say that you can never go back—and that’s true. We change and so the places we return to will not seem the same.

Hurts don't stop, but they fade into 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.

With an endless library,” Livira muttered, “if you search long enough, you can find a book that agrees with just about any opinion you have

Everything we see is seen through the lens of our expectation. Our prejudice provides a broad brush, imagination sprinkles detail, some of which may actually be there. We ascribe meaning and intent with a careless disregard for our constant failure at such prediction. One is forced to wonder if the blind man’s hands lie to him as eloquently as vision does to the sighted.

We’re all the story we tell about ourselves, silly.” Another wave rocked them. “That’s all anyone ever is—the story they tell, and the stories told about them. Fiction captures more than facts do. That’s why the library keeps it. It’s the most important part of our memories.

It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.

It's in the nature of humans to want to belong to a group, to want to be accepted, appreciated, and needed. What is most frightening about their kind are the sacrifices they are prepared to make in order to become part of such a tribe, clique, sect, sewing circle, cult, or book club. Reason and morality are often at the top of the list of what must be surrendered as part of the club fees. Truth becomes a collective property, an adaptable shield used to shelter the in-group from those outside. Dobs, on the other hand, are great.

there were books in the library that were thousands of years old. And not just one or two, but legions of them. So many that there must, Livira thought, be pages within their covers that had waited a thousand years to be seen again. And the magic was that just by running her eyes over those squiggled letters the thoughts of some long-dead author would wake within her head.

The black and white of truth blurred into grey under the relentless assault of an infinity of context, interpretation, perspectives, and opinion.

Yute told me a great writer once said that fiction was easy—all you have to do is sit in front of a blank page and bleed.” Livira snorted. “Yute said there was a people who took that literally. They wrote everything in blood, which he felt was trying too hard, but perhaps a good way to conserve paper and make sure you get to the point quickly.

Many objects are an inherent invitation. A sharp edge invites you to cut. A coin wishes to be spent. A sword begs for violence. A door requires that you try to open it.

The importance of “between” is often overlooked in the hurry of getting from one place to another. In truth it is these interstitial spaces which, in their linking of this to that and of now to then, might be considered a more fundamental layer in reality’s manifold.

All of us in our secret hearts, in our empty moments of contemplation, stumble into the understanding that nothing matters. There’s a cold shock of realisation and, in that moment, we know that nothing at all is of the least consequence. Ultimately, we’re all just spinning our wheels, seeking to avoid pain until the clock winds down and our time is spent. To give someone purpose is to free them, however briefly, from the spectre of that knowledge.

Would it really take a vengeful god to bring them all to ruin, or was it simply a case of handing sharp knives to toddlers and waiting for the bleeding to start?

The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read.

She was used to being told not to ask questions. Adults didn’t like it. But she had always thought that they knew the answers and that they simply found it too irritating to supply them to a child on demand

A good book invites the reader in,' Livira said. 'The writer's only half the equation.

All of it is representative of a truth. Truths cast many shadows, some of which are very different when the light shines from one direction than from another. The library is a compromise -- that's truth. The library is a battleground. That's also a kind of truth. The library is many things from many angles. Both blessing and curse. A razor blade given to a baby; a rope thrown to a drowning man.