Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Quotes
"The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind."
"Those were the days when I rarely touched paper."
"It turned out that I could stay focused on job hunting if I got myself away from the internet."
"San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong."
"The city is a tiny square punctuated by steep hills and bounded on three sides by water, and as a result, there are surprise vistas everywhere."
"Whenever I walked the streets of San Francisco, I’d watch for HELP WANTED signs in windows."
"Inside: imagine the shape and volume of a normal bookstore turned up on its side."
"The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest—not a friendly California forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest."
"Penumbra sells used books, and they are in such uniformly excellent condition that they might as well be new."
"This is the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard."
"The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley."
"You must keep precise records of all transactions."
"Every night I show up at 10:00 p.m. and find Oliver behind the front desk, always reading a book."
"Ashley is beautiful. Probably too beautiful—too shiny and clean-lined, like a 3-D model."
"I have exactly $2,357 in the bank and the company I work for—if you can call it a company—exists in the extrafinancial space inhabited by money launderers and fringe churches."
"But I used to work in an office; I used to work on a team. Here it’s just me and bats."
"When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?"
"Grumble manages a bustling pirate library. He writes complicated code to break the DRM on e-books; he builds complicated machines to copy the words out of real books."
"You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell."
"I suppose it is a relief. Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage."
"Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade."
"People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you."
"We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century."
"I think we’re going to find different ways to think, thanks to computers."
"It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out."
"But it’s already happening. And it’s not weird, it’s not science fiction at all, it’s..."
"The genius of the libraries is that they are all different."
"Strange things are afoot at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore."
"I’ve tried many times to figure out exactly what ignites it—what cocktail of characteristics comes together in the cold, dark cosmos to form a star."
"I love books because books are my best friends."
"Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore."
"Imagine if we could make all that OK/TK available all the time, to everyone. On the web, on your phone. No question would go unanswered ever again."
"This company is the most important part of my life. It's the most important part of me."
"It feels like loading a really hard math problem into a computer."
"To hear Neel tell it, Igor taught himself matrix math on the back of a shovel, ruled the Minsk hacker scene as a sixteen-year-old."
"I didn’t know you could code. The graphics don’t matter."
"But this is a Rockets & Warlocks scenario. You called it. How many times did we invent something like this? Now it’s real."
"I’ve never felt that way about a job (or a cult). You could stop me at the train station and talk me into anything."
"When you work on websites, you interact with far-off servers in ways that have not really changed much since 1987."
"Stuff that used to be hard ... just isn't hard anymore."
"Computers, my boy, they hold the key for us."
"We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment—maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere."
"We are not so young, Ajax. If you rededicate yourself to our task, there is still time for you to do great work."
"The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk."
"It is old, certainly. But any vault is the same: a sturdy chamber, built belowground, cold and dry. Unremarkable."
"We must not falter. We must unlock the Founder’s secret, so that Zaid and all who came before him can live on."
"He presented it to the First Reader—this was Nivean, before Corvina—and it was accepted."
"You have to learn each course as you go—come up with a plan, try it out, adjust. Seriously, my brain is more tired than my arms right now."
"I believe the codex vitae can be decoded today—not in a decade, not in a hundred years, but today!"
"You’re meant to scale the walls, stone by stone."
"We can OCR the book and make sure everything works."
"He could not make the sacrifice. He could not leave his final volume unpublished."
"Everything we need is already here in the text."
"I would absolutely, positively freeze my head."
"Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet."
"A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we’re penciling it in for a Friday morning."
"The best option is sleep, but I dozed on the plane and now I’m restless, like something in my brain is still circling the runway, refusing to come in for a landing."
"Maybe he didn’t have enough help. Maybe he didn’t have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat—until now."
"He made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs."
"Every transformation that can be applied to this text is being applied. Every possible error is being accounted for, every optical eigenvalue is being inveigled."
"We didn’t capture the pages inside, of course—that would be a project of a different scale. If you’re ever playing Super Bookstore Brothers, navigating a 3-D simulacrum of Penumbra’s bookstore with pink-yellow light coming in the front windows and a foggy particle effect rising in the back, and you decide you want to actually read one of the beautifully textured books: too bad."
"I realize something very sad: this skinny, blue-eyed man bent my life into a crazy curlicue … and all I know about him is what it says on the front of his store."
"They’re not magic. They’re only as capable as their programmers, right?"
"Stolen stuff recirculates. Stays out of the ground."
"It’s a museum’s job to keep things for posterity."
"Everything in there is a treasure to somebody."
"Thank you, Teobaldo. You are my greatest friend. This has been the key to everything."