I might be the villain of this story.
Rebecca MakkaiTags: first-sentence villains
On my mental instant replay, I realized that obliquely comparing his family to the Nazis was maybe not my finest moment.
He was quiet a second, and then he said, 'Did you know that Hitler anted to be an artist, but since he couldn't get into art school, he turned into a Nazi?'
'Yes, I remember that.'
'Just imagine if he got into art school, the whole world would be different.'
I said, 'It just shows that people should be allowed to be who they are. If they can't, then they turn into nasty, sad people.'
He started to laugh. 'What if you went to the art gallery, and the guy was like, "Here you see a beautiful Monet, and here on your left is an early Hitler." Wouldn't that be weird?'
I couldn't think of any subtle way to turn it back around again.
He said, 'You would go to the gift shop and buy Hitler postcards, and you'd go, "Oh, look at this beautiful Hitler. I'm going to hang it in my room!" And people would wear Hitler t-shirts.'
'Yes,' I said. 'That would have been better.
Because what it's come down to, after that whole messy spring, that whole tortured summer, all the time since, is this: I no longer believe I can save people. I've tried, and I've failed, and while I'm sure there are people out in the world with that particular gift, I'm not one of them. I make too much of a mess of things. But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.
Rebecca MakkaiHe started Number the Stars before we were even out of the store. "The only problem is, I already know how it ends," he said. "Because once when I looked at it back at the library, I found out."
"I do that too," I said. "It's a bad habit."
"But I never mean to." He was walking, talking, and reading all at the same time. "It's that I always have to look back and see how many pages there are, so I know when I'll be exactly halfway through, but then when I see the last page it's like my eyes suck up all the words.
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