Home > Work > Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2)
21 " Think of it this way: alchemists of old relied on the energy provided by tides, the moon, sun, planets in alignment. Every experiment was delicate and had to be balanced just so, or there couldn't be a proper result. Obscurists have an inborn talent to provide that energy from within and not from the world around us; we are born with quintessence. "
― Rachel Caine , Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2)
22 " Archimedes taught that of all the five elements, quintessence is the most rare, the most valuable, the one that transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary. We are quintessence. It's a divine gift, and like all gifts, we must use it for the Library's greater glory. "
23 " Archimedes said mathematics reveal its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love for its own beauty. But the Archivist has no love for knowledge. He wants only power. You are the club he swings to get it. "
24 " the chaos of the world that counted people as different levels of worthy, the Library served all equally. All genders, races, levels of ability. It was the one place they could all be safe. "
25 " He’d grown so addicted to the feel of those books—the individual differences in the bindings, the leather or fabric covers, the weight of papers, the smell. They were a very different experience than these Blanks, which all felt so . . . sterile, somehow. Words that could be readily dismissed and replaced didn’t have the same moral heft to them, to him, "