The God of Lost Words
A.J. Hackwith
Top 10 Best Quotes
“History is told by the victors, isn’t that how it goes? Fight for something and lose, you’re insurrectionists, conspirators, terrorists. Fight for something and win, you’re rebels, freedom fighters, founding fathers. History is a story told in past tense, the best kind of propaganda. What everyone forgets is that, at one point in the story, every villain thinks they are the hero. History happens in the edit.”
“Maybe a library isn’t defined by what it holds. Maybe it is defined by what it does.”
“Listen. That's the part of the librarian's job that everyone forgets. Listen. Listen to your books, listen to your patrons. Listen to your enemies, even; when they're maddest is when you know you're doing something right. A librarian's job is to listen. A library's job is to be a place where the hopeless can feel seen and heard too.”
“Regret lingers on. Regret fractures our souls into many. Maybe, just maybe, the counterpower to creation isn’t destruction—that’s just entropy, just natural. No, the opposite of creation isn’t destruction; it’s regret. It’s the stories we never tell that carry the most weight.”
“Humans love to make things complicated. Look at belief. They build whole morality and judgment systems on it—who believes what, believes in the right way, believes strongly enough. It’s so unnecessary. Belief, when you get right down to it, is just a powerful story. Tell a story well, and the reader doesn’t just want it to be true—they know it is. Get enough souls to believe in a story, and you can change the world. Or make one.”
“A library is people. Just as much as it is books and archives. You want to know the heart of a library, don’t look at its most famous books; look at the people it serves. Who it comforts, who it protects. The heart of a library may be its books, but its soul is its people. Humans and stories, impossible to separate the two.”
“If we wait for a landlord who will not eat us for his own benefit we’ll be realmless forever, Rami. Leto told me about this once; it’s called capitalism.”
“Churches gave sanctuary, in my time. To the unwanted, the unloved, and also the criminals, whether they repented or not. I don't see why a library in Hell shouldn't be a kind of church - lord knows that we have enough altars to longing, to regret, to mistakes, here in the stacks. Few souls find their way down here, but if they do, what shelter we can provide, the Library should. Libraries have always been a kind of church, a kind of sanctuary.”
“we decide our stories. What happens to you is not the story. The plot is not the story, the conflict is not the story, the world is not the story. The story is you. You, the character; you, the reader; and the liminal watercolor of magic that happens between those two. Love a story, hate a story, tire of a story, all the possible magic a story has is contained between those two immovable, unknowable forces.”
“the third was a perfectly average urban fantasy featuring two brothers and a muscle car.”
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Book Keywords:
sanctuary, library, librarian, listen
