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.”

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.”

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

“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.”

“The world as it is is enough.”

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

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.

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