Library Silence Quotes

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

You see, I don't belive that libraries should be drab places where people sit in silence, that has been the main reason for our policy of employing wild animals as librarians.

The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death. How would that be? Just how would that be?

This silence, this moment, every moment, if it’s genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There’s nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’ Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

Silence is kind of awkward, don’t you think?” he said. Oh. Or not. “No. I’m okay with silence. We’re in a library after all. This is the birthplace of silence.” “The library is the birthplace of silence?” David asked. “All the words are being used by the books. When I was little, that’s what I used to think. That people were told to be quiet so that all their words didn’t get stolen by the books. I thought books needed words to exist. Well, obviously they do, but I thought they needed spoken words. Yeah … I was always weird.” “And here I thought libraries were quiet because people were trying to study,” David whispered. “That might be another explanation.

The places of quiet are going away, the churches, the woods, the libraries. And it is only in silence we can hear the voice inside of us which gives us true peace.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will's life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in the training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood- the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he'd found out the child's name was James. He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will's hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa heard Jem's voice in their minds. I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace. Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem's.

In evil times, when public virtue has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one cares to disturb the silence of the libraries.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future. We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jutjawed silence both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can't communicate them anymore and if we tried it would take a million years and a billion books ― Too late, too late, the history of everything we've seen together and separately has become a library in itself ― The shelves pile higher ― They're full of misty documents or documents of the Mist - The mind has convoluted in every tuckaway every whichaway tuckered hole till there's no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone the old.

Even so,” I said levelly, “you wouldn’t shoot me.” “Wouldn’t I?” He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have a silencer,” I pointed out, “and the sign says to be quiet in the library.” I knew I had him there.

Most people enter a library and don’t hear a thing. Eerie silence. I stand between the shelves and hear ten thousand conversations occurring all at once. Each ushering an invitation. The noise is raucous.

The country was a nice thing, as long as it was in the middle of town and you could reach a civilized place with shops, libraries and newspapers within five minutes or so.

A library is a sacred place where the voices of the ancients can still be heard if we but give them the required silence.

Censorship thrives in silence; silence is its aim.

Library? Yes!

Why do you ask?" "Because I can." "You can what?" "I can go in the private collection!" I scurried toward him. "My father had a lifetime subscriptioin, Mr. Sheridan, and not just that, but he had special privileges. I'm certain I could use his name to get you into the private collection." Daniel's jaw fell. "Why didn't you say so before?" "What?" I recoiled. "How was I supposed to know you needed it?" "We could've gone ages ago!" My enthusiasm transformed into outrage. "In that case, why didn't you say you needed it?" "Because I didn't know you had a subscription!" "Aha!" I cried, thrusting a finger at him. "Your argument's a circle!" Daniel sprang up. "We wasted all this time-" "Silence!" Joseph roared. "You are like squawking parrots, and I have had quite enough. Miss Fitt, I would ask that you take Mr. Sheridan to the library immediately. Daniel, I would ask that you keep that big mouth of yours silent.

The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We

The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

To the winter forest And nowhere to go This girl runs From all she knows The pressure rises to the top The pressure rises (it won't stop) They want your body They want your soul They want fake smiles That's rock and roll The wolves surrond you A fever dream The wolves surrond you So start the scream Howl, into the night, Howl, until the light, Howl, your turn to fight, Howl, just make it right Howl howl howl howl (Motherfucker) You can't fight fo ever You have to comply If your life isn't working You have to ask why Remember When we were young enough Not to fear tomorrow Or mourn yesterday And we were just Us And time was just Now And we were in Life Not rising through Like arms in a sleeve Because we had time We had time to breathe The bad times are here The bad times have come but life can't be over When it hasn't begun The lake shines and the water's cold All that glitters can turn to gold Silence the music to improve the tune Stop the fake smiles and howl at the moon Howl, into the night, Howl, until the light, Howl, your turn to fight, Howl, just make it right Howl howl howl howl

There, I said to myself, are the reasons for the silence and darkness that surround the library: it is the preserve of learning but can maintain this learning unsullied only if it prevents its reaching anyone at all, even the monks themselves. Learning is not like a coin, which remains whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact?

Activity was always to Inspector Slack’s taste. To rush off in a car, to silence rudely those people who were anxious to tell him things, to cut short conversations on the plea of urgent necessity. All this was the breath of life to Slack.

These items make up my existence. The library tells my story, the mastodon my mistakes, the ship my discoveries and my abilities to make old things new without magic, and the whale...my limitations, I suppose.

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building. Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world's dead.

The silence inside the library, the big chairs, and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it—all of that made me love it.

Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness. / At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays--especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare--or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them. / So he switched to opera--usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more. / Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. / And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

She loved being in the library, the almost sacred silence you could find there, the way it felt like another home.

The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted.

Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.

At the first gate, the gatekeeper asks, “Is this true?” At the second gate, he asks, “Is it kind?” And at the third gate, “Is it necessary?” If we applied this proverb strictly, most of us would have very little to say. I am not recommending silence, however, but control over our speech.

They call it 'the whispering of the stars.' Listen," he said, raising a finger for silence. I could still hear the tinkling and craned my neck to see what it was. Zhensky laughed. "No, here. Look." He formed his mouth into a wide O and exhaled slowly. As he did, I saw the cloud of breath fall in droplets to the ground. That was the sound I heard: our breath falling. "It's a Yakut expression. It means a period of weather so cold that your breath falls frozen to the ground before it can dissipate. The Yakuts say that you should never tell secrets outside during the whispering of the stars, because the words themselves freeze, and in the spring thaw anyone who walks past that spot will be able to hear them.

The other [picture] was a ruined village made up of rubble and cracked houses and trees raked clean of bark. Just looking at it,I could almost hear a lonely wind blowing; the palpable silence of a place robbed suddenly of life.

In addition to the eternal, mystical Silence and the Holy Spirit, certain gnostics suggest a third characterization of the divine Mother: as Wisdom. Here the Greek feminine term for “wisdom,” sophia, translates a Hebrew feminine term, hokhmah.

The library, then, at seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, seven-forty-five of a Sunday night, cloistered with great drifts of silence and transfixed avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.

An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library director was notified that only unobtrusive plainclothesmen were entering the building. Their instructions: “When you find him, overpower him. Quietly.” It was done, and only a few people in the crowded building saw a handcuffed man being ushered past the checkout counter. “See,” one librarian remarked quietly to an amazed person, “that’s what happens when you don’t pay your book fines.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.” -Jordan B. Peterson

If they treated me the way they treat you, they’d have to keep paying me for my silence, but I’m a petty asshole,

Bonaventure heard the determination behind the Wanderer's library deed. It sounded like a thousand marching boots.

Silentiary (n.) An official whose job it is to command silence. I would like to have my very own silentiary, someone I can bring to the library and to the apartment next door. Sitzfleisch

We should follow strict silence in a library. If we are not silent, it will disturb others, which will affect their learning. By not being silent, we become responsible for others’ ignorance.

It was suffused with a weak, academic light—different from Plano, different from anything I had ever known—a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

O’ Look—the fair seat of bliss and isolation, away from the pompous,rich and pride city’s wanton heart,the adoring woods paved meek ways of silence,and beneath the steep hill’s hide, the brook ran in peace.

There was a silence that ranged from faith and trust (Kai) through horrified disbelief (Evariste) to a sort of harmony between high-grade suspicion (both Hu and Captain Venner) and consideration (George and Lily).

But then twitching nervously in the presence of a librarian wasn't an uncommon response—librarians, like ministers of religion, and poets, and people with serious mental health disorders, can make people nervous. Librarians possess a kind of occult power, an aura. They could silence people with just a glance. At least, they did in Israel's fantasies. In Israel's fantasies, librarians were mild-mannered superheroes, with extrasensory perceptions and a highly developed sense of responsibility who demanded respect from everyone they met. In reality, Israel couldn't silence even Mrs Onions on her mobile phone when she was disturbing other readers.

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.

Time and silence,’ ” he read. “Both of which can be found in libraries. My favorite is ‘All human wisdom is contained in these two words—wait and hope.’ I also appreciated ‘There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul.

A teenager deserves a library that recognizes reality. He needs an information source and study area that does not impose arbitrary, crippling rules on him. His library should recognize that dignity and silence are not prior requisites to learning […] He would like, needs, and deserves for other people to stop trying to protect him and allow him the right to choose information for himself […] Most of all the teenager needs people in libraries to recognize and accept him as a respectable human being.

In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom.

Theophilus and his co-pastor had tried to shut down the first public library that opened in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was introducing “improper literature,”12 and the preachers did not believe that churchgoers should risk their souls—or indeed their minds.

Libraries were always set at what seemed like the perfect temperature, and to me were the only place on earth where you could actually "hear" silence. Some of you know what I’m talking about, but for the rest of you… you’ll just have to figure it out on your own.

ONE SWALLOW does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison, despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be stimulated. Some letters—both his and hers—were confiscated for some timid expression of affection. So they wrote about literature, and used characters as codes. All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss! Tristan and Isolde the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Once, in despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. They charted the daily round too, in boring, loving detail. He described the prison routine in every aspect, but he never told her of its stupidity. That was plain enough. He never told her that he feared he might go under. That too was clear. She never wrote that she loved him, though she would have if she thought it would get through. But he knew it. She told him she had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents, brother or sister again. He followed closely all her steps along the way toward her nurse’s qualification. When she wrote, “I went to the library today to get the anatomy book I told you about. I found a quiet corner and pretended to read,” he knew she was feeding on the same memories that consumed him “They sat down, looked at each other, smiled and looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between them, they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up. He had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the larger thought. I love you, and you saved my life. He asked about her lodgings. She told him. “And do you get along all right with your landlady?” He could think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had, rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could easily slip back into being a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse’s uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her landlady’s temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him that her lunch break would soon be over.

For similar reasons, one common cause of committal to an asylum in Elizabeth’s time was “novel reading.”9 Doctors believed that those who indulged in this “pernicious habit”10 lived “a dreamy kind of existence, so nearly allied to insanity that the slightest exciting cause is sufficient to derange.”11 No wonder Theophilus and his co-pastor had tried to shut down the first public library that opened in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was introducing “improper literature,”12 and the preachers did not believe that churchgoers should risk their souls—or indeed their minds.

Not only the portraits on the walls, but also the shelves in the library were thinned out. The disappearance of certain books and brochures happened discretely, usually the day after the arrival of a new message from above. Rubashov made his sarcastic commentaries on it while dictating to Arlova, who received them in silence. Most of the works on foreign trade and currency disappeared from the shelves – their author, the People’s Commissar for Finance, had just been arrested; also nearly all old Party Congress reports treating the same subject; most books and reference-books on the history and antecedents of the Revolution; most works by living authors on problems of birth control; the manuals on the structure of the People’s Army; treatises on trade unionism and the right to strike in the People’s State; practically every study of the problems of political constitution more than two years old, and, finally, even the volumes of the Encyclopedia published by the Academy – a new revised edition being promised shortly. New books arrived, too: the classics of social science appeared with new footnotes and commentaries, the old histories were replaced by new histories, the old memoirs of dead revolutionary leaders were replaced by new memoirs of the same defunct. Rubashov remarked jokingly to Arlova that the only thing left to be done was to publish a new and revised edition of the back numbers of all newspapers.

There is a thumping silence, and the light of the one lamp across the wet tiled floor seems conscious that it will illuminate this and many other atrocities, just as it will go on shining through days and months of sudden speechless lusts, and all the intervening hours of silent emptiness.

Has not printing freed the education of the people from all political and religious shackles? It would be vain for any despotism to invade all the schools....The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves. How with the multitude of different books, with the innumerable copies of each book, of reprints that can be made available at a moment's notice, how could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.

If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privlage through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.

Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters….So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished. But there is the machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night.

I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I’m afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me. Are they gossiping, or has some moribund discretion fallen over my name? I’m not sure which is worse. I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand. Most of all, I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record. But that, I know, would only leave a human-shaped hole. I imagine everybody gazing into the space where I ought to be.

You and Beatrix haven’t known each other long enough to consider matrimony. A matter of weeks, to my knowledge. And what about Prudence Mercer? You’re practically betrothed, aren’t you?” “Those are valid points,” Christopher said. “And I will answer them. But you should know right away that I’m against the match.” Leo blinked in bemusement. “You mean you’re against a match with Miss Mercer?” “Well…yes. But I’m also against a match with Beatrix.” Silence fell over the room. “This is a trick of some sort,” Leo said. “Unfortunately, it’s not,” Christopher replied. Another silence. “Captain Phelan,” Cam asked, choosing his words with care. “Have you come to ask for our consent to marry Beatrix?” Christopher shook his head. “If I decide to marry Beatrix, I’ll do it with or without your consent.” Leo looked at Cam. “Good God,” he said in disgust. “This one’s worse than Harry.” Cam wore an expression of beleaguered patience. “Perhaps we should both talk to Captain Phelan in the library. With brandy.” “I want my own bottle,” Leo said feelingly, leading the way.

She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

The entire corpus of Sappho’s work burned with the great Library of Alexandria, so today we know her only through the bits other writers quoted, shadows of Sappho cast on our cave wall. Time marbled silence throughout the texts, and those gaps, those cavities, beg readers to wonder them full, to complete the poet’s circuits of cognition – twenty-six centuries after they were made.

Long before his death in 873 at the age of seventy-two, AI-Kindi had succumbed to prolonged depression and silence. Although a friend managed to retrieve his library by means of some subtle extortion, he never really recovered from the ordeal of his public flogging. AI-Kindi was the first major figure of Islamic scholarship to fall victim to the orthodox reaction against rationalism

If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. ... So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

University libraries, responding to student demand, are now social hubs as much as places of work, the cathedral silence that once characterised the library a thing of the past. In this, libraries actually hark back to an earlier model, pioneered in the Renaissance, when libraries were often convivial social spaces, in which books jostled for attention alongside paintings, sculptures, coins and curiosities.

We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moment of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whilst all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes. The Art of the Index, by Dr. H. Worblehood

We seem afraid of the natural forces. John Burroughs puts it well, says, if the American is only dry, he is not content to take a drink of pure cold water, but must put sugar into it, or a flavor. To me, these things—the things of which these are the type—are the prominent dangers in the future of our America. The exhilaration of such freedom—the going and coming—the being master of yourself and of the road! No one who is not a walker can begin to know it! Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights!—in the after hours—sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water—what a fullness of inspiration they imparted!—what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too—wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path: I remember one place in Maryland in particular to which we would go. How splendid, above all, was the moon—the full moon, the half moon: and then the wonder, the delight, of the silences.

I used to think one day we'd tell the story of us ; How we met, and the sparks flew instantly. People would say have said they're the lucky ones. I used to know my place was a spot next to you and then it went to me searching the room for an empty seat 'Cause lately I don't even know what page you're on Oh, a simple complication, Miscommunications lead to fall out. So many things that I wish you knew oh and So many walls up, I can't break through Now I'm back again on this website after five years And I'm dying to know does it still hurt you like it hurts me? I don't know what to say since a twist of fate, when it all broke down and the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now How'd we end up this way? With both of us deleting our accounts and going our separate ways So, today I'm telling the story of us of how I was losing my mind when I saw you had deleted the account and gone away without a goodbye and no I miss yous leaving me with just your quotes on Goodreads How you held your pride like you should've held me Why did we pretend this is nothing? I'd tell you I miss you, but I don't know how I never heard silence quite this loud Now I'm standing alone in a crowded room in a UK library reminiscing about the days when I was 15 and you were a 16 California boy; how we fell for each and how we fought both too immature to realize what we were setting up in flames How I still recall your replies and my singing heart and shining eyes. Didn't tell you back then and now I'm saying I liked it better when you were on my side So many things that you wish I knew ; So many that I wish I had told you But the story of us has broken, burned and ended Now I'm standing alone in a crowded room And we're not speaking : And I'm dying to know Is it killing you like it's killing me? But I don't know what to say Since a twist of fate, when it all broke down And the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now.

As a stalwart reader of printed books, I’m left to wonder what will happen to the wide, slow silty river of the their history, to the countless volumes waiting now in the abandoned silence of library stacks. Stacks: The word itself connects books to the harvest, to corn and hay. They were always earthbound. Smell the must, feel the brittle, browning pages between your thumb and forefinger. The tears, the cracked spines, the stains and folds. Even if we readers forget them, printed books will hold us in their memory.

But when I set my suitcase on the floor and started to undress, my ears adjusted to that seductive hush unique to libraries and childhood bedrooms—a busy, almost trance-inducing silence, a noiseless hum, as if all those abandoned books and journals buzzed on an alternate frequency straining to be tapped—until slowly the hush itself became real. I’ve come to think that, much as neglect in infancy scars the eventual adult, so our first experiences of pleasurable solitude teach us how to be content by ourselves and shape the conditions in which we seek it.

He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked. There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him. She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they need not cut sandwiches—that was all. They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you. He said, It must rain. He said, It won’t rain; and instantly a Heaven of security opened before her. There was nobody

Consider it a Solstice and birthday present in one.' He gestured to the house, the gardens, the grounds that flowed to the river's edge. With a perfect view of the Rainbow at night, thanks to the land's curve. 'It's yours. Ours. I purchased it on Solstice Eve. Workers are coming in two days to begin clearing the rubble and knock down the rest of the house.' I blinked again, long and slow. 'You bought me an estate?' 'Technically, it will be our estate, but the house is yours. Build it to your heart's content. Everything you want, everything you need- build it.' The cost alone, the sheer size of this gift had to astronomical. 'Rhys.' He paced a few steps, running his hands through his blue-black hair, his wings tucked in tight. 'We have no space at the town house. You and I can barely fit everything in the bedroom. And no one wants to be at the House of Wind.' He again gestured to the magnificent estate around us. 'So build a house for us, Feyre. Dream as wildly as you want. It's yours.' I didn't have words for it. What cascaded through me. 'It- the cost-' 'Don't worry about the cost.' 'But...' I gaped at the sleeping, tangled land, the ruined house. Pictured what I might want there. My knees wobbled. 'Rhys- it's too much.' His face became deadly serious. 'Not for you. Never for you.' He slid his arms around my waist, kissing my temple. 'Build a house with a painting studio.' He kissed my other temple. 'Build a house with an office for you, and one for me. Build a house with a bathtub big enough for two- and for wings.' Another kiss, this time to my cheek. 'Build a house with a garden for Elain, a training ring for the Illyrian babies, a library for Amren, and an enormous dressing room for Mor.' I choked on a laugh at that. But Rhys silenced it with a kiss to my mouth, lingering and sweet. 'Build a house with a nursery, Feyre.' My heart tightened to the point of pain, and I kissed him back. Kissed him again and again, the property wide and clear around us. 'I will,' I promised.

The library smells like old books—a thousand leather doorways into other worlds.” Mr. Brown paused and glanced up at the room, but especially at James for one moment. “I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers.” Mr. Brown paused as he stared at the page, and then read, “Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like—” Here Mr. Brown paused again. “Like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I’ll say this is just a place where you can’t play music or eat. She’s gone. The library sucks.

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire! There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library... And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had!

As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

A challenge.” He tsked. “I’ll let you take it back. Just this one.” “I cannot take it back.” At that, Irex drew his dagger and imitated Kestrel’s gesture. They stood still, then sheathed their blades. “I’ll even let you choose the weapons,” Irex said. “Needles. Now it is to you to choose the time and place.” “My grounds. Tomorrow, two hours from sunset. That will give me time to gather the death-price.” This gave Kestrel pause. But she nodded, and finally turned to Arin. He looked nauseated. He sagged in the senators’ grip. It seemed they weren’t restraining him, but holding him up. “You can let go,” Kestrel told the senators, and when they did, she ordered Arin to follow her. As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

Strong, broad hands rubbed down my spine, and I opened my eyes to find the room wholly black, Rhysand perched on the mattress beside me. 'Do you want anything to eat?' His voice was soft- tentative. I didn't raise my head from the pillow. 'I feel... heavy again,' I breathed, voice breaking. Rhys said nothing as he gathered me up into his arms. He was still in his jacket, as if he'd just come in from wherever he'd been talking with Cassian. In the dark, I breathed in his scent, savoured his warmth. 'Are you all right?' Rhys was quiet for a long minute. 'No.' I slid my arms around him, holding him tightly. 'I should have found another way,' he said. I stroked my fingers through his silken hair. Rhys murmured, 'If she...' His swallow was audible. 'If she showed up at this house...' I knew who he meant. 'I would kill her. Without even letting her speak. I would kill her.' 'I know.' I would, too. 'You asked me at the library,' he whispered. 'Why I... Why I'd rather take all of this upon myself. Tonight is why. Seeing Mor cry is why. I made a bad call. Tried to find some other way around this shithole we're in.' And had lost something- Mor had lost something- in the process. We held each other in silence for minutes. Hours. Two souls, twining in the dark. I lowered my shields, let him in fully. His mind curled around mine. 'Would you risk looking into it- the Ouroboros?' I asked. 'Not yet,' was all Rhys said, holding me tighter. 'Not yet.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

I don’t have to be able to see you to feel your disapproval, you know.” Tristan finally broke the silence. The two hour carriage ride had been painfully quiet. Tristan leaned his head against the back of the leather seat. “I have my reasons, and I don’t intend to share them with my valet.” Ellis grunted, but remained quiet. “She is better off without me.” Four beats later, Ellis responded. “There is no reason to share your thoughts with a mere valet, my lord.” “I cannot give her the life she deserves.” “As you say.” “Her ladyship seems to think my blindness makes no difference.” “Please pardon the pun, my lord, but how very insightful of her.” “I shall fire you when we reach London.” “I shiver with anticipation.” How was it he could not seem to even have his own employees agree with him? And“I don’t have to be able to see you to feel your disapproval, you know.” Tristan finally broke the silence. The two hour carriage ride had been painfully quiet. Tristan leaned his head against the back of the leather seat. “I have my reasons, and I don’t intend to share them with my valet.” Ellis grunted, but remained quiet. “She is better off without me.” Four beats later, Ellis responded. “There is no reason to share your thoughts with a mere valet, my lord.” “I cannot give her the life she deserves.” “As you say.” “Her ladyship seems to think my blindness makes no difference.” “Please pardon the pun, my lord, but how very insightful of her.” “I shall fire you when we reach London.” “I shiver with anticipation.” How was it he could not seem to even have his own employees agree with him? And why did he permit such insolence? “May I make a suggestion, my lord?’ “No, you may not.” “I suggest you take a day or two to ponder your actions, and then perhaps send for her ladyship.” “Definitely being fired when we reach London.” “I shall look forward to my new duties.” Tristan tapped his foot, boredom setting in. “Did you pack any books? Perhaps you can read to me to pass the time.” “I noticed an open copy of One Thousand and One Nights in the library this morning, but since I know her ladyship was reading it, I left it there.” “Her ladyship was reading it to me,” he bristled. “Ah,” Ellis said, with no regret in his voice. “If only her ladyship were with us now. With the book…” “Never mind. I could use a nap.” “Yes, my lord. A nap might restore your good humor.” “When I fire you, there will be no reference.” “I have no expectation of one, my lord.” Tristan settled back, knowing full well that

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

In those days, before everyone had cell phones or smartphones or iPods, the library was a quieter place. The librarians, many of whom had received their degrees in Library Science in the 1950s, enforced this silence with the zeal of a born-again monk. In fact, the only place as quiet, then or now, was the church.

Despite his forbidding silence, living with my grandfather finally allowed me to put words to the fears and nightmares from which I had suffered for as long as I could remember. His vast library taught me many things, including that I was part of a community of people coming to terms with a genocide. And if his library taught me the vocabulary and the history, he himself taught me to recognize the landscape in which the survivors of destruction live their lives, to see that minefield of guilt and sadness for what it was. Hints of the people and the world lost were everywhere, waiting to blow holes in his fragile hold on the present. Just as I vacuumed my crumbs and wipes up my water droplets, I did my best, for his sake and mine, not to disturb the minefield. Little did I know, he was still suffering from the fallout of a single explosion, the one that had originally blown him and my grandmother apart.

As she approached the library, she felt her heartbeat quicken uncomfortably. Squaring her shoulders, she crossed the threshold. Devon appeared to be browsing over a row of books, reaching up to straighten a trio of volumes that had fallen sideways. “My lord,” Kathleen said quietly. Devon turned, his gaze finding hers at once. He was stunningly handsome, dressed in a dark suit of clothes that had been tailored in the new looser-fitting fashion, the coat, waistcoat, and trousers all made of matching fabric. The informal cut of the suit did nothing to soften the hard lines of his body. For a moment Kathleen couldn’t help remembering the feel of his arms around her, his solid chest beneath her cheek. Heat swept over her face. Devon bowed, his face inscrutable. He appeared relaxed at first glance, but a closer look revealed faint shadows beneath his eyes, and finespun tension beneath his calm veneer. “I hope you’re well this morning,” he said quietly. Her blush deepened uncomfortably. “Yes, thank you.” She curtsied and wove her fingers together in a stiff knot. “You wished to discuss something before you depart?” “Yes, regarding the estate, I’ve come to some conclusions--” “I do hope--” she began, and broke off. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to--” “Go on.” Kathleen dropped her gaze to her clenched hands as she spoke. “My lord, if you decide to dismiss any of the servants…or indeed all of them…I hope you take into account that some have served the Ravenels for their entire lives. Perhaps you might consider giving small parting sums to the oldest ones who have little hope of securing other employment.” “I’ll bear it in mind.” She could feel him looking at her, his gaze as tangible as the heat of sunlight. The mahogany bracket clock on the mantel measured out the silence with delicate ticks. His voice was soft. “You’re nervous with me.

With its reverent silence the Library was as close to a religious experience as anything he had ever encountered. Its domed reading room was a thing of sheer beauty and wonder. It always inspired in him a childish desire to stand in the centre and spin round and round, making it appear as though the books spiralled into infinity.

no more stolen moments, let alone hours, in which to discover each other . . . from now on, they were formally betrothed, and that betrothal had its own rules. Maddening, perhaps intentionally so. Luci filched another stuffed date from the tray a sleepy maidservant was carrying back to the kitchen, and followed her father into the library. Her uncle and grandfather, already relaxed in chairs by the fireplace, looked up as she came in. "Luci, you should be in bed." "Papa, I'm not sleepy." He raised his eyebrows at her, but she didn't move. "Papa, I had a message cube from Esmay today." Her uncle Casimir sighed. "Esmay . . . now there's another problem. Berthold, did you get anywhere in the Landsmen's Guild?" "Nowhere. Oh, Vicarios won't oppose us, but that's because of Luci, and his support is half-hearted. It would be different if she hadn't left so young, I think. They don't really remember her, and even though they awarded her the Starmount, and consider her a hero, they do not want a Landbride—any Landbride but especially our Landbride—connected to an outlander family. Cosca told me frankly that even if she moved here, and also her husband, he would oppose it. Nothing good ever came from the stars, he insisted." "And the votes?" "Enough for a challenge, Casi, I'm sure of it. No, the only way out of this is for Esmaya to come and talk to them herself." "Or resign." "Or resign, but—will she?" Luci spoke up. "She mentioned that in her cube." "What—resigning? Why?" "Her precious Fleet seems to think about us the way the Landsmen's Guild thinks about them. She says they have some kind of regulation forbidding officers to marry Landbrides." Her father snorted. "Do they have one forbidding officers to be Landbrides? How ridiculous!" "Are you serious?" Casimir asked. "They have something specific about Landbrides? How would they know?" "I don't know," Luci said. "That's just what she said. And she said why didn't we take in all those women brought back from Our Texas—she was sure they'd fit in." A stunned silence, satisfying by its depth and length. "She what?" Casimir said finally. "Aren't those women—" "Free-birthers and religious cultists," Luci said, with satisfaction. "Exactly." "But—but the priests will object," Berthold said. "Not as badly as the Landsmen's Guild, if they hear of it. Dear God, I thought she had more sense than that!" "She is in love," Luci pointed out, willing now to be magnanimous. "Apparently Fleet is taking Barin's salary to pay for their upkeep—at least some of it—and Esmay's trying to help him out. Nineteen of them, after all, and all those children." "At our expense." Casimir shook his head. "Well, that settles it. She'll have to resign, as soon as I can get word to her. The Trustees will certainly not approve this, if I were willing to let it be known." He gave Luci a hard look. "You didn't tell Philip, I hope." "Of course not." Luci glared at her uncle. Esmay might not have any sense, but she knew what the family honor required. "I hope she does name you Landbride, Luci," Casimir said. "You'll be a good one." Luci had a sudden spasm of doubt. Was she being fair to Esmay, who after all had had so many bad things happen to her? But underneath the doubt, the same exultation she had felt when Esmay gave her the brown mare . . . mine, it's mine, I can take care of it, nobody can hurt it . . . "I wonder if we could place an ansible call," Casimir said. "Surely it's not that urgent,

The words looped in my head. Download it for free. Cheerful, triumphant. Download it for free! What a freaking bargain. “I’m sorry,” I said. “She found what?” "That website. Meems, what was the name again? Bongo or something?” Mimi looked up from her iPad. “What are you talking about?” “That website where you found Sarah’s book.” "Oh,” she said. “Bingo. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s like an online library. You can download almost anything for free. It’s amazing.” My hands were shaking. I set down Jen’s phone, and then I set down the wineglass next to it. Without a coaster. "You mean a pirate site,” I said. “Oh God, no! I would never. It’s an online library.” "That’s what they call it. But they’re just stealing. They’re fencing stolen goods. Easy to do with electronic copies.” "No. That’s not true.” Mimi’s voice rose a little. Sharpened a little. “Libraries lend out e-books.” “Real libraries do. They buy them from the publisher. Sites like Bingo just upload unauthorized copies to sell advertising or put cookies on your phone or whatever else. They’re pirates.” There was a small, shrill silence. I lifted my wineglass and took a long drink, even though my fingers were trembling so badly, I knew everyone could see the vibration. "Well,” said Mimi. “It’s not like it matters. I mean, the book’s been out for years and everything, it’s like public domain.” I put down the wineglass and picked up my tote bag. “So I don’t have time to lecture you about copyright law or anything. Basically, if publishers don’t get paid, authors don’t get paid. That’s kind of how it works.” "Oh, come on,” said Mimi. “You got paid for this book.” "Not as much as you think. Definitely not as much as your husband gets paid to short derivatives or whatever he does that buys all this stuff.” I waved my hand at the walls. “And you know, fine, maybe it’s not the big sellers who suffer. It’s the midlist authors, the great names you never hear of, where every sale counts … What am I saying? You don’t care. None of you actually cares. Sitting here in your palaces in the sky. You never had to earn a penny of your own. Why the hell should you care about royalties?” I climbed out of my silver chair and hoisted my tote bag over my shoulder. “It’s about a dollar a book, by the way. Paid out every six months. So I walked all the way over here, gave up an evening of my life, and even if every single one of you had actually bought a legitimate copy, I would have earned about a dozen bucks for my trouble. Twelve dollars and a glass of cheap wine. I’ll see myself out.

Kes sat in his library, filling his lungs with air that smelled of old books and his ears with the blessed sound of silence. There was, at last, space enough to think and breathe.

Professor Lundborg and his assistants did not answer Allan’s questions, but they made notes and hummed and then left him in peace, sometimes for days at a stretch. Allan devoted those days to all kinds of reading: the daily newspapers of course, but also books from the hospital’s extensive library. Add to that three square meals a day, an indoor toilet, and a room of his own, and you can see why Allan found it very comfortable to be locked up in an asylum. The atmosphere had been a little unpleasant only once, and that was when Allan asked Professor Lundborg what was so dangerous about being a Negro or a Jew. For once, the professor didn’t respond with silence, but bellowed that Karlsson should mind his own business and not interfere in other people’s affairs. Allan was reminded of that time many years ago when his mother had threatened to box his ears.

Everything smelled of dust trapped in light, cracked leather and wayward dreams. Breathing in and out through her nose, Tella looked down at the Map of All. It had transformed once they'd entered the library. It now revealed an entire kingdom made of books that could either have been a book lover's nightmare or their wish come true. There was a Broken Spine Castle, an Unread River, a Ravine of Ripped Pages, a Poetry Valley, a set of Novel Mountains, and then finally, the Ruscica and Books for Advanced Imaginations. The most direct route to this room was through an area referred to as The Zoo. Tella wondered if it would have books in cages, but The Zoo didn't even have bookshelves. The books all roamed freely in this room as they clung together to take the shapes of different animals. Tella spied bookish rhinos, paper-mache elephants and very tall giraffes that milled about in an oddly peaceful silence. The elephant sniffed at Tella with its leathery-grey trunk of books, while a paper bunny made of loose pages noiselessly hopped after Legend. The bunny continued to follow as they left The Zoo and reached The Reading Chamber, where books formed couches and chairs and one massive throne.

Charles opened a thick volume of the encyclopedia to a chapter on owls and read as he ate. He found himself quickly distracted by a description of this strange bird’s incredible powers of hearing (a high perched owl could detect the sounds of a tiny mouse moving beneath a foot of snow!) as Adèle slowly finished her food in silence. She never seemed to object when he worked at the supper table. In fact, it was how they spent many evenings. She was employed at the university library and would often bring him home books on subjects related to his cases. It made him happy to share his work with her, and he was always grateful for her thoughtful assistance and insights. To him, it was like they were one organism, different arms and legs carrying the two lobes of one great mind.

Another day and another passed of rough seas and lowering skies; of rolling and pitching, cold winds, and cold damp eating into bones softened by tropic warmth; of a treadmill of watches in a wheelhouse dank and gloomy by day and danker and gloomier by night; of sullen silent sailors and pale dog-tired officers, of meals in the wardroom eaten in silence, with the captain at the head of the table ceaselessly rolling the balls in his fingers and saying nothing except an infrequent grumpy sentence about the progress of the work requests. Willie lost track of time. He stumbled from the bridge to his coding, from coding to correcting publications, from corrections back up to the bridge, from the bridge to the table for an unappetizing bolted meal, from the table to the clipping shack for sleep which never went uninterrupted for more than a couple of hours. The world became narrowed to a wobbling iron shell on a waste of foamy gray, and the business of the world was staring out at empty water or making red-ink insertions in the devil’s own endless library of mildewed unintelligible volumes.

I do not believe a voiceless person exists - only people who are ignored or otherwise silenced.