Top 40 A.J. Hackwith Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A library is people. Just as much as it is books and archives. You want to know the heart of a library, don’t look at its most famous books; look at the people it serves. Who it comforts, who it protects. The heart of a library may be its books, but its soul is its people. Humans and stories, impossible to separate the two.”

— A.J. Hackwith

2. “How much easier it would be if everyone knew their role: the hero, the sidekick, the villain. Our books would be neater and our souls less frayed. But whether you have blood or ink, no one’s story is that simple.”

— A.J. Hackwith

3. “Maybe a library isn’t defined by what it holds. Maybe it is defined by what it does.”

— A.J. Hackwith

4. “Listen. That’s the part of the librarian’s job that everyone forgets. Listen. Listen to your books, listen to your patrons. Listen to your enemies, even; when they’re maddest is when you know you’re doing something right. A librarian’s job is to listen. A library’s job is to be a place where the hopeless can feel seen and heard too.”

— A.J. Hackwith

5. “The patron god of the library is the one who needs it, who claims the necessity of a place of stories and souls and is willing to build it. Sometimes that’s the librarians and curators, sometimes that’s the storytellers, but sometimes? Sometimes it’s just you. You, the reader, who found your wild and winding way to the pages. You have a library inside you, do you not? Stories, told and untold. That is the power of gods.”

— A.J. Hackwith

6. “It’s not such a ridiculous thing, to be willing to die for an idea. Sometimes, that’s the only thing worth a good death.”

— A.J. Hackwith

7. “History is told by the victors, isn’t that how it goes? Fight for something and lose, you’re insurrectionists, conspirators, terrorists. Fight for something and win, you’re rebels, freedom fighters, founding fathers. History is a story told in past tense, the best kind of propaganda. What everyone forgets is that, at one point in the story, every villain thinks they are the hero. History happens in the edit.”

— A.J. Hackwith

8. “It’s hard to be brave alone.”

— A.J. Hackwith

9. “Build good fences, make good friends, and keep your laundry indoors.”

— A.J. Hackwith

10. “Two different beasts: deception and secrets. Deceptions are when you lie to others; secrets are when you lie to yourself.”

— A.J. Hackwith

11. “Even the battles you lost are worthy,” Bjorn said. “Winning doesn’t make a warrior; trying to live does that.”

— A.J. Hackwith

12. “She cleared her throat. “He’s not wearing much armor.” The warrior, in fact, wore more war paint and feathers than clothes from the waist up. “Oh, good. I would hate to cause him a laundry bill when I inconsiderately die all over him.”

— A.J. Hackwith

13. “Build good fences, make good friends, and keep your laundry indoors. Leave just enough doubt in their minds to make yourself not worth the trouble. Librarian Gregor Henry, 1982 CE.”

— A.J. Hackwith

14. “War has always followed libraries, my apprentice. History has made no effort to hide that truth from us. Look at Rome; look at the Crusades. Vanquishing an enemy and taking his books was just as strategic as taking his cannons. Books are knowledge weaponized. And what weapons you cannot steal, you must burn.”

— A.J. Hackwith

15. “They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.”

— A.J. Hackwith

16. “Anxiety could fill up the darkness with all the monsters it wished, but if Brevity tried very hard, maybe she could squeeze in one monster of her own.”

— A.J. Hackwith

17. “Books are knowledge weaponized. And what weapons you cannot steal, you must burn. Librarian Gregor Henry, 1986 CE.”

— A.J. Hackwith

18. “Stories are, at the most basic level, how we make sense of the world. It doesn’t do to forget that sometimes heroes fail you when you need them the most. Sometimes you throw your lot in with villains.”

— A.J. Hackwith

19. “Churches gave sanctuary, in my time. To the unwanted, the unloved, and also the criminals, whether they repented or not. I don’t see why a library in Hell shouldn’t be a kind of church – lord knows that we have enough altars to longing, to regret, to mistakes, here in the stacks. Few souls find their way down here, but if they do, what shelter we can provide, the Library should. Libraries have always been a kind of church, a kind of sanctuary.”

— A.J. Hackwith

20. “If we wait for a landlord who will not eat us for his own benefit we’ll be realmless forever, Rami. Leto told me about this once; it’s called capitalism.”

— A.J. Hackwith

21. “The hurt doesn’t stop just because you turn your back on it.”

— A.J. Hackwith

22. “Humans love to make things complicated. Look at belief. They build whole morality and judgment systems on it – who believes what, believes in the right way, believes strongly enough. It’s so unnecessary. Belief, when you get right down to it, is just a powerful story. Tell a story well, and the reader doesn’t just want it to be true – they know it is. Get enough souls to believe in a story, and you can change the world. Or make one.”

— A.J. Hackwith

23. “And what part of that doesn’t scream ‘terrible trap’?” Claire ceded that point. “You’re awfully cautious for a hero sometimes.” “The living ones usually are.”

— A.J. Hackwith

24. “It is a story’s natural ambition to wake up and start telling itself to the world.”

— A.J. Hackwith

25. “Creatures of Hell, on general principle, took to following orders as well as one might expect. Which is to say, not at all and with liberal interpretation.”

— A.J. Hackwith

26. “The best stories are bled.”

— A.J. Hackwith

27. “Stories are, at the most basic level, how we make sense of the world.”

— A.J. Hackwith

28. “The entire wing. All books on lockdown. Nothing leaves. Jot a note to inform the muses. Earth is just going to have to deal with writer’s block until we get back.”

— A.J. Hackwith

29. “You can care and still cause harm. Feeling, caring, for someone else is the worst kind of weapon, in my experience. It allows you to do things you never through you could do and things you never thought you would do. All for the love of someone else.”

— A.J. Hackwith

30. “Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself. Every book is a secret that only readers know.”

— A.J. Hackwith

31. “Stories can die. Of course they can. Ask any author who’s had an idea wither in their head, fail to thrive and bear fruit. Or a book that spoke to you as a child but upon revisiting it was silent and empty.”

— A.J. Hackwith

32. “Nothing burns up humanity as thoroughly as eternity.”

— A.J. Hackwith

33. “Regret lingers on. Regret fractures our souls into many. Maybe, just maybe, the counterpower to creation isn’t destruction – that’s just entropy, just natural. No, the opposite of creation isn’t destruction; it’s regret. It’s the stories we never tell that carry the most weight.”

— A.J. Hackwith

34. “To be a librarian is to be in rebellion against time, against the world.”

— A.J. Hackwith

35. “Beat an archangel, divert war, save our souls. Simple as that?”

— A.J. Hackwith

36. “A lie. A dream. Good stories are both,” Claire dismissed. “Is it so bad? He’ll remember the story, turn it over carefully in the back of his mind, feel the edges of it like he would a lucky coin. A story will change him if he lets it. The shape and the spirit of it. Change how he acts, what dreams he chooses to believe in. We all need our stories; I just fed him a good one.”

— A.J. Hackwith

37. “We’ve got a job to do, sure, but what good’s a librarian without a story of his own?”

— A.J. Hackwith

38. “It’s easy to be brave on a leash.”

— A.J. Hackwith

39. “I’ve seen enough revolutions in my time to say it with some authority: rebellions are built on love and hope. You can’t reject the status quo unless you are hopeful enough to imagine something better. Of course, that doesn’t make a lot of difference once the killing starts.”

— A.J. Hackwith

40. “Claire lived by the firm moral philosophy that one could never have too many pockets, too many books, or too much tea.”

— A.J. Hackwith

41. “We think stories are contained things, but they’re not. Ask the muses. Human, stories, tragedies, and wishes – everything leaves ripples in the world.”

— A.J. Hackwith

42. “It smelled like the color thirteen; it felt warm as violet; it whispered cardamom binaries.”

— A.J. Hackwith

43. “The first library was a song.”

— A.J. Hackwith

44. “Forgiven doesn’t mean no regret. We’ll always regret the wrongs we’ve done. It just means you’re not punishing yourself for it.”

— A.J. Hackwith

45. “Letting books take you where they might – that was one part of the Library magic.”

— A.J. Hackwith

46. “Every book carried a scar, a splinter of psyche, that was essential to its need to exist.”

— A.J. Hackwith

47. “Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world.”

— A.J. Hackwith

48. “The spoken word was the first kind of library, after all.”

— A.J. Hackwith