The Labyrinth of the Spirits (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #4)

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

One doesn’t become aware of the emptiness in which one has allowed time to go by until one truly lives. Sometimes life—not the days that have burned away—is just an instant, a day, a week, or a month. One knows one is alive because it hurts, because suddenly everything matters, and because when that brief moment is over, the rest of one’s existence becomes a memory to which one tries in vain to return while there is some breath left in one’s body.

How beautiful life would be if we were able to love those who deserve it.

like all great men in small times, he is a nobody.

one should never make decisions in anger, pain, or fear.

we’re children of our time.

“We each live our faith in our own way,”

That Sunday morning, as usual, Juan Sempere sat in the last pew to hear mass and watch how the early birds of the neighborhood—a mishmash of devout women and sinners, lonely people, insomniacs, optimists, and those retired from the business of hope—came together to beseech the Lord, in his infinite silence, to remember them and their fleeting existences.

A parent never sees his children grow old. To a father’s eyes, they always seem like those kids who once looked up at him with veneration, convinced that he had the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.

You’re only free up to the point where you ignore the truth.”

When you’re in power, nobody stabs you face-to-face, always in the back and with an embrace.

Stories have no beginning and no end, only doors through which one may enter them. A story is an endless labyrinth of words, images, and spirits, conjured up to show us the invisible truth about ourselves. A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.