Ink And Bone Quotes

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

Ink and parchment flowed through her veins. The magic of the Great Libraries lived in her very bones. They were a part of her, and she a part of them.

Clary widened her eyes, which was good for keeping herself from crying. "Isabelle, can I ask you something?" "Sure," said Isabelle, wielding the eyeliner expertly. "Is Alec gay?" Isabelle's wrist jerked. The eyeliner skidded, inking a long line of black from the corner of Clary's eye to her hairline. "Oh hell," Isabelle said, putting the pen down.

You have ink in your blood, boy, and no help for it. Books will never be just a business to you.

Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.

There are three parts to learning: information, knowledge and wisdom. A mere accumulation of information is not knowledge, and a treasure of knowledge is not in itself, wisdom.

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

Lives are short, but knowledge is eternal.

We never wanted to conquer the world, only our fears.

I must acquire my own information, build my own knowledge, and, through experience, transform it to the treasured gold of wisdom.

Losing one pint of blood's an accident. Losing two is carelessness.

A few months ago, she’d gotten a tattoo, a single word inked from wrist bone to wrist bone, just under the heel of her hand. SURVIVOR.

The first purpose of a librarian is to preserve and defend our books. Sometimes, that means dying for them - or making someone else die for them. Tota est scientia.

Delighted," Jess said. "I think all houses should be stuffed with books. It makes them--" "Homes?" the doctor finished. "You are quite the heretic, for someone in a Library uniform." "Guilty.

When you steal a book, you steal from the world, the Library propaganda said

Jess had never imagined that someone would be so empty that they’d need to destroy something that precious to feel full.

I gambled for the soul of the Library. And I lost.

They've all got stories, Jess thought. I need to know them. Best of all, he could know them. He could learn anything here. It felt like limitless possibilities.

You have to learn how to listen before you will hear.

Desperate people do desperate things. You cannot be one of them. You must be better.

Vita hominis plus libro valet! A life is worth more than a book.

My left hand is a Rorschach blotch all its own, a six-fingered, skin-blood-and-bone ink splatter. People see it and fly their worst fears and secret fetishes at full mast when they think they’re being discreet. They see it as strange, fascinating, ugly, beautiful, disgusting or erotic depending on what’s behind their eyes.

For a perversion of knowledge is surely worse than a lack of it

This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was something worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things.

But the Library still held everything he’d ever wanted, too. All the knowledge in the world, right at his fingertips

The destruction of Rayy taught us that calculated politics and unthinking rage—make no mistake, the two are sometimes hand in hand—are the greatest threats knowledge can face.

Books and men left the same traces where they burned. The

I'm as good a Catholic as you," Jess said. "I just don't hold with making the world into copies of what I like.

Don’t play to your strengths,” Jess told her. “Strengthen your weaknesses.

Tota est scientia Knowledge is all

Kisses could lie as well as words.

And knowledge is the purest form of power.

Smile while you can,’ Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. ‘Smile like the skull you’ll be, you fool, before you’re worse than bones.

With some enemies, it’s safer to let them destroy themselves.

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other.

After the noise and jostle of the journey, there was something soothing about the crackle of paper, the smell of ink, and the soft scratching of nibs and brushes.

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.

Not all knowledge is books. Those out there, they’re history is stone. Men carved them. Men sweated in this sun to put them there, to make their city more beautiful. Who are you to say what’s worthy for men to see today, or tomorrow?

he’s staring at me, so intense and focused, as though I’m the only thing he sees or cares about in this moment. I already know, deep down in my bones, that being looked at like that by him will be an addiction I won’t be able to shake.

I'm all right, Nic," Wolfe said, and finally looked at him. "We walked through the dungeons under Rome, survived Philadelphia, and this perfumed cage won't bring us to our knees. We're all stronger than that." "All right," Santi said. "But don't ask me to stop standing next to you. Because you know I will, however much you shout about it.

In the end, mean or kind, the world is full of people who are all similar. We are bone and blood, and some consciousness tied to it. So, don't give your enemies the satisfaction of watching life go by, and whether it be a passion, a place, a person, or just a lonely friend bound to ink and paper, love as hard and as long as you can.

My job is not to sell the books - my father does that - but to look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor improtant enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the boooks they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

His divine wisdom can kiss my common arse

I am not the Library’s child! I must acquire my own information, build my own knowledge, and, through experience, transform it to the treasured gold of wisdom.

As Jess watched in numb horror, the man tore a page from the book and stuffed it into his mouth.

Even here, you can ask the wrong questions and speak the wrong truths, Postulants. Here ends today’s lesson. Tota est scientia.

Some people you don’t walk away from.

The calcium of bones, the keratin of eyelashes, the exhalations of our bodies - all these are reconstituted as carbon atoms, used to make the world anew: the earth, the lilies of the field, the ink of this book. What is can never cease to be. Kenelm found comfort in these alchemists' precepts, touching them again and again like rosary beads. We are all stars, and to the stars we return.

Bright flashes of memory sparked through Kaz’s mind. A cup of hot chocolate in his mittened hands, Jordie warning him to let it cool before he took a sip. Ink drying on the page as he’d signed the deed to the Crow Club. The first time he’d seen Inej at the Menagerie, in purple silk, her eyes lined with kohl. The bone-handled knife he’d given her. The sobs that had come from behind the door of her room at the Slat the night she’d made her first kill. The sobs he’d ignored. Kaz remembered her perched on the sill of his attic window, sometime during that first year after he’d brought her into the Dregs. She’d been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof. “You shouldn’t make friends with crows,” he’d told her. “Why not?” she asked. He’d looked up from his desk to answer, but whatever he’d been about to say had vanished on his tongue. The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbor wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world. “Why not?” she’d repeated, eyes still closed. He said the first thing that popped into his head. “They don’t have any manners.” “Neither do you, Kaz.” She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.

And so the very institution we thought would bring the most light to the world has instead drowned it in shadows, and claimed that shadow as full sun. And we, poor blind creatures, have believed the lie. It

We are only the most visible casualties of a silent war, and as they lock collars on our necks and tell us it is for our protection, we know that worse will come.

It began to feel almost benign, these calm days in the sun.

Jack of all trades, master of none...He'd always thought knowing many things gave him strength. Now it made him feel vulnerable.

Silence itself seemed to flow from him like a dark tide, black and thick as ink. It chilled her bones.

He pulled out his personal journal and pen. Jess understood the impulse, all too well, to spill out the bile and hurt into ink, where no one could see it.

Fear holds on. Love lets go.

With bones of ships and soldiers at her feet. With blood on her hands and nothing inside.

Remember, losing one pint of blood’s an accident. Losing two is carelessness.

He needed to keep this woman with him. He didn't even know why the compulsion was so strong, but that need was relentless, bone deep. Soul deep.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.

The stars would be different, where he was going. But the moon would be the same.

Pharaoh has also heard your words regarding the unaccompanied admission of females to this sacred space of the Serapeum, and in his divine wisdom refuses this argument, for women must be instructed by the more developed minds of men to ensure they do not wrongly interpret the riches that the Library offers.

Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She

What I had meant to say in the kitchen was that I had loved fish since I was little—white bite, crispy skin. I had been waiting for it so long that the picture of soft flesh decomposed and left bones for a fossil. When I had argued in the kitchen, I was arguing about what was lost to me. Like how I could not read the letters because of the old water stains that had spread ink across the bottom of the page. The problem was not the damage but the cause. I recognized the tears my younger self had wept while touching the shapes on the paper.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

Hold fast To the law Of the last Cold tome, Where the earth Of the truth Lies thick On the page, And the loam Of faith In the ink Long fled From the drone Of the nib Flows on Through the breath Of the bone Reborn In a dawn Of doom Where blooms The rose For the winds The child For the tomb The thrush For the hush Of song, The corn For the scythe And the thorn In wait For the heart Till the last Of the first Depart, And the least Of the past Is dust And the dust Is lost. Hold fast!

Are you all right?" The question surprised Jess, and it broke through his black shell enough to make him throw a look at his friend. "No." I didn't think you were. Everyone wants you to be. That must be worse, that they think you should be fine.

For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me—naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe’s furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration)—but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description.

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land.

Cass sighed. She set the letter aside too. She'd never be able to send it anyway. Falco was gone. She might never see him again. Cass dipped her quill into the ink and touched it to her first page of the journal. She wrote: You may study the bodies of the living and the dead for clues about the mechanism of the muscles, the bones, and even the brain, but you can never unravel the mystery of the human heart...

Standing in the doorway, wearing only a white towel latched under his pelvic muscles. Tommy Bianchi is dripping wet. My mouth turns bone dry. Lord Jesus. Whoever made his image needs a big fucking bonus. Inked body. Olive skin. Defined muscles. Miles and miles of protruding veins. Dusting of dark body hair. And that’s without adding in his six-foot three stature. Yeah, I checked his wiki page last night to see what details his fangirls knew about him. He isn’t hard on the eyes. It doesn’t hurt to look at all that wet skin. Not at all. I can see why he’s been voted People’s Sexiest Man Alive.

Indeed, to perish from illness while surrounded by books seems fitting, for I am more ink and paper than skin and bones.

Reset the board and keep playing.

There was a damp crack as the flesh and bones of the dead finally failed, and the gate slammed shut.

Beginnings and endings, flesh and bone, ink and paper. These are what stories are made of.

Her fate is inked in her blood,” Harald said, giving a wry shake of his head. “It’s carved in her bones. This power is Freya’s destiny.

My fault

He and his mother weren't close and never had been, really. In this, as in so much else in his life, Jess was alone

Tota est scientia.

he began to realize how much he had to learn about how different the world was from the theory of it.

I write poems to save myself, to preserve in ink memories of me long after my soul has dissolved and my bones melted, joined in a most holy matrimony with the dirt I am.

Jess understood, at a very fundamental level, that when he’d seen that book being destroyed, he’d seen a light pass out of the world.

The girl with the pictures on her skin

A true child of the library. Ink and parchment flowed through her veins. The magic of the Great Libraries lived in her very bones. They were a part of her, and she a part of them.

He ran his hand over his chest and stopped above his heart where a black tattoo of an ornate skeleton key was inked on his skin.She had its other half-a lock in the shape of a heart with a keyhole in the center-tattooed on her lower stomach beside her right hip bone. Laying on top of her, he'd slide down to kiss her breasts and their two tattoos would come together. Lock and key.

He’s going to get hurt. And he’s got to know you’re someone safe to come back to. He’s going to feel that in his bones. Just like I do. Because loving someone doesn’t mean needing them to be what you want them to be or swaddling them in bubble wrap so they can’t move. It means them knowing, deep down inside of their heart, you’re going to be there to hold them when they fall and celebrate when they fly.

Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.)

A blank isn't the same. He remembered holding the book, feeling the history of the leather cover someone had tanned and stretched and cut to fit. The paper that someone had laboriously filled by hand and sewn into the binding. Years, heavy on the pages. Morgan had been reading a copy of it. An original. It felt like the old monk's story was part of his own. But when he read it in the blank, it was just words, and it had no power to carry him away.

He was smothered by dread. Fear. A horrible sense of being hunted. And then one of the automaton lions turned its head toward him. The eyes shone red. Red like blood. Red like fire. They could smell it on him, the illegal book. Or maybe just his fear

When I’ve decided what I want. I take it. And right now, I want you. I need you. I’m not abandoning you, and you’re not leaving me. Not ever.” … “You’re inked in my soul, branded on my flesh, and carved in my bones. So trust me when I say. You’re worth it, Ahrianna.

His divine wisdom can kiss my common arse. We blind and hobble half of the world through such ignorance, and I will not have it. Women shall study at the Serapeum as they might be inclined. Let him execute me if he wishes, but I have seen enough of minds wasted in this world. I have a daughter. My daughter will learn.

Funny thing about having choices taken away from you—it tended to make things all kinds of crystal clear. You either felt relief all the way into your bones because it was the right decision even if you hadn’t made it, or every cell inside you cried out in rebellion and loss and regret because you learned—too late—what it was you really wanted.

I know he’s right. An all-consuming love is incredible. That kind of love awakens you from the bones and keeps you smiling all your life. But eventually, life and kids and all the other bullshit that comes along with that love takes pieces of you. And if you don’t have anything to fill you back up, you’ll pour from an empty cup until you’re dry as the desert.

Fifty years in this northern land Living as a machine that speaks Living as a human under a yoke Without talent With a pure indignation Written not with pen and ink But with bones drenched with blood and tears Is this writing of mine Though they be dry as a desert And rough as a grassland Shabby as an invalid And primitive as stone tools Reader! I beg you to read my words. —Bandi

The Great Library may have once been a boon, but what is it today? What does it give us? It suppresses! It stifles! You, sir, do you own a book? No, sir, not a blank, filled only with what they want you to read...a real book, an original work, in the hand of the writer? The library owns our memories, yet you cannot own your own books! Why? Why do they fear it? Why do they fear to allow you the choice?

It didn't help matters that Khalila suddenly broke down in tears. Even Glain seemed emotional. Jess was a little surprised by that. But the real question, Jess thought, is 'why I feel so little and they feel so much.' Maybe it was his upbringing. Maybe it was all the death he'd seen in the smuggling trade. Or maybe he was just trying to keep it all locked in a small, dark box until he could face what he felt.

This story is always yours for the telling. This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance. You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home. Or, you share it with the whole fucking world. You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once. But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell. And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

There are things I can confess only after swallowing a bottle of ink. How i crushed a moth between my palms before it rushed to the fireplace. These hands that are used to killing things midflight. Like my mother tongue. Before I can roll out my rounded R and O. Because women like me are believed to practise witchcraft and blackmagic. We swallow men and spit out their bones. These hands that danced with your ghosts on the bluest 4 AMs. These hands that raised a knife to its throat. How deep was the longing to be nothing more than an empty bed, an empty room. If someone asks you tell them writing was the closest I came to witchcraft. Poetry was the closest I came to being possessed. I wanted to leave behind more than emptiness so I wrote. . They say it takes 7 seconds for the eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. I glide across the dark room like the light was never here. Your body imprint on the mattress lost to the frenzied waltz of sunray and dust. How easy was it to just grab a handful of you before you dissolved. If someone asks tell them loving you was the closest I came to seeing god. . On some nights I open the curtains and you are the moon. I am the darkness surrounding it. Which is to say I don't know how to love without being consumed. If they ask you tell them remembrance was the closest I came to being sick. . Once I met a homeless man who spoke in madness because he had forgotten his mother tongue. How long do you hide yourself from the world before you forget your beginning. Like him - I too am full of silence. My beloved - a handful of you, your body. There are things I could only tell the moths but they no longer visit. I have put off the fireplace. Which is to say they too don't know how to love something that won't kill them. . My phone always autocorrects I love you to I live you and what is love if not living the other person. One summer afternoon our bodies turned into each other's. Your breath played lye strings on my neck. If they ask you tell them that was the closest I came to being alive.