Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.

“The world as it is is enough.”

we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month:

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

Four questions, a little scavenger hunt.

But we will never see them. None of us will. We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.”