Extraits

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

« Tu n’as pas besoin de comprendre la vie. Il suffit de la vivre » (page 401)

« -J’aimerais essayer une vie où je ne suis pas en panne… Vous n’êtes pas censée me le dire?

-Je crains de n’être que la bibliothécaire.

-Les bibliothécaires ont des connaissances. Elles nous indiquent les bons livres. Les bons mots. Elles trouvent les meilleurs endroits. Comme des moteurs de recherche dotés d’âme.

-Absolument. Mais encore faudrait-il que tu saches ce que tu aimes. Ce que tu écrirais dans la case de recherche métaphorique. Et parfois, il faut faire plusieurs essais avant que ça devienne clair. »

Si un joueur est réduit à un pion et un roi lors que l'adversaire a encore toutes ses pièces, il y a encore une partie. Et même si tu étais un pion - et peut-être que nous sommes tous des pions -, tu dois te rappeler que le pion est la pièce la plus magique de toutes. Il a peut-être l'air petit et ordinaire, mais ce n'est pas le cas. Parce qu'un pion n'est jamais seulement un pion. Un pion est une reine en puissance. Tu n'as qu'à trouver le moyen de continuer à avancer. Une case après l'autre. Pour atteindre l'autre côté, et libérer toutes sortes de pouvoirs.

Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.

You are forgetting who you are. In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.

She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But it was because it hadn't been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the 'tonic of wilderness' as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.

There ar patterns to life... Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a byproduct of living a certain way, rather than simply leaving. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of leaving that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amounts of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.

It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.