Home > Work > The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library, #2)
1 " Every book carried a scar, a splinter of psyche, that was essential to its need to exist. "
― A.J. Hackwith , The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library, #2)
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " To be a librarian is to be in rebellion against time, against the world. "
5 " Letting books take you where they might – that was one part of the Library magic. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " Hero’s wasn’t. He wasn’t book enough, not really. The damsel suite felt like a pantomime in a foreign land that he was supposed to call home. A language that was supposed to be in his blood but felt borrowed on his tongue. Too much a book to be a person. Too much a person to be a book. "
9 " Sometimes, simply being here was all the truth needed. "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " reader doesn’t mark his life by days but by memories. A book doesn’t mark its life by pages but by readers. We are made up of those whom we touch. "
13 " It smelled like the color thirteen; it felt warm as violet; it whispered cardamom binaries. "
14 " 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. "