Frodo: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
Gandalf: “So do I. So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, “Lord of the Rings”

“Repository… you know this word? A resting place. A text – a book – is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on… But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
– Anthony Doerr, “Cloud Cuckoo Land”

“…To deface the pages of a book was to adopt the manner of a  Visigoth. It was to strike a blow against that most sacred and noble of man’s achievements – the ability to set down his finest ideas and sentiments so that they might be shared through the ages.”
– Amor Towles, “the Lincoln Highway”