The Bookbinder Quotes

“When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realised they couldn’t stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine, a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realised, will have told a slightly different story.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Summer mornings had no manners; they slipped beneath our curtains and roused a winged chorus, and I was awake long before I wanted to be.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant. Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. She broke it down so that each phrase could be understood as an articulation of something singular.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“What is worse than tedious?’ ‘Dishonest.’ Lotte looked at me, her head tilted. She smiled. ‘Dishonest. Yes. Manners are often that.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“It’s so romantic, isn’t it? But I was incensed. I told him I’d had my fill of poetry that painted ordinary men as saints for dying worse than ordinary deaths or getting injuries that meant they’d live worse than ordinary lives. I told him there was nothing noble about dying in a bloody cornfield – it was just a waste.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“The words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. They also’ – and again she poked at the translations – ‘tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Of course with you, but I can’t be a wife and mother and a scholar as well. It just isn’t possible, and I can’t deny you those things that you want.’ My voice faltered. I’d never said it aloud, never even articulated it in thought. ‘The life you offer is too much.’ ‘You think you have to choose?’ ‘Oh, Bastiaan, I know I have to choose.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Words that no one valued, spoken by women that no one would have remembered if she hadn’t written their names on slips of paper. I put it in my reading pile.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Your stitching is what will hold the story together.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Poetry is how we endure the unendurable. Sometimes it has to be a lie.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Why do we have so many books? I liked to ask. To expand your world, she would always say.
When she died, my world shrank.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Haig is our Odysseus now, and the Somme offensive is his bloody journey to glory.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“When it was time for me to go, he had ceased to be invisible.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“I don’t know. Some push, though even the rumour is classified. We usually don’t get much notice. Anyway, where was I?’ Tilda smiled, theatrical. ‘The Indians and Canadians are polite; the Australians are not, but they’re fun with it. The New Zealanders are somewhere in between.’ She leant forward. ‘I’m quite partial to New Zealanders, though God only knows what possesses them to keep coming. They’re hardly at risk of invasion. I doubt Kaiser Bill even knows where New Zealand is.’ ‘I suppose it’s one way to see the world?’ said Gwen. ‘I don’t think it ends up being the grand tour they’re hoping for,’ Tilda replied.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Summer mornings had no manners;”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Some things have to be voiced over and over, they have to be shared and understood, they have to echo through time until they become truth and not just fancy.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“I knelt, cleared the leaves and pulled weeds from the ground beside her grave. I ran my fingers over her name and felt the shape of each letter. Why did we have to wait until we were dead to have our names inscribed on something?”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Grand Union Canal,”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Love Eternal, in Baskerville typeface. He'd chosen it for its clarity and beauty.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“When a privilege is unfairly denied, then it must be taken.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“Wolvercote.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“The myriad ways our words had failed to be bound, and here they were, finally, and there was only one bloody copy.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder

“section of another Oxford”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“saw Alison weep over the body of the filthiest of Huns. A boy, his voice still squeaking. He’d taken to calling her ‘Mutter’. It sounds so much like ‘Mother’. And ‘wasser’ sounds like ‘water’, and ‘freund’ sounds like ‘friend’. Would it surprise you to know that their blood is red, and when they are in pain they groan? When they know they will never see their home again they cry?”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“If they loved us, then our deaths would become their sacrifice and they could sleep more easily.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“I looked at the queue of men and wondered if it was better to know what was coming or be encouraged by some boyhood image of St George. I thought of my invisible Belgian and what must be hidden beneath his bandages. How many of them would come home like that? How many of them would come home?”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“Another casualty of this bloody war, I thought. But I knew it wouldn’t be counted.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho

“They’re over, she’d said, filling our glasses a second time – not bothering with the soda. All the firsts. The first Christmas, Easter, birthday. The first anniversary of her death.She’d clinked her glass against ours and drunk. There’ll be no more and you can start living without her. It wasn’t entirely true, but I was glad she’d said it. It felt like permission.”
― Pip Williams, The Bookbinder of Jericho