## Metadata - Author: [[Irene Vallejo and Charlotte Whittle]] - Full Title: Papyrus - Category: #books ## Highlights - To write is to try to find out what we would write if we wrote, says Marguerite Duras, moving from the infinitive to the conditional and then to the subjunctive as if she could feel the ground splitting beneath her feet. It isn’t so different, in the end, from any of the things we start doing without knowing how to do them: speaking another language, driving, being a mother. Living. ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09N6V47M7&location=141)) - The book has withstood the test of history, has proved it can go the distance. Each time we awake from the dream of our revolutions or the nightmare of our catastrophes, the book is still there. In the words of Umberto Eco, the book belongs to the same category as the spoon, the hammer, the wheel, or a pair of scissors. Once invented, these things cannot be surpassed. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09N6V47M7&location=201)) - Let’s not forget that the book has been our ally for centuries in a war that is absent from history textbooks. The struggle to preserve our most valuable creations: words, which are scarcely a puff of air; the stories we tell to give meaning to chaos and to survive it; the true, false, always provisional knowledge we scratch across the hard rock of our ignorance. ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09N6V47M7&location=210)) - The book collector’s passion is similar to that of the traveler. Every library is a journey, every book a passport that never expires. ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09N6V47M7&location=493)) - owning books is a balancing act performed on a tightrope. An effort to unite the disparate pieces of the universe until they formed a whole that made sense. A harmonious architecture in face of chaos. A sculpture made of sand. A sanctuary where we safeguard all that we fear we may forget. A memory of the world. A dam holding back the tsunami of time. ([Location 642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09N6V47M7&location=642))