The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1)

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn’t bring himself to reply.

Six years later my mother’s absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day. As a child I learned to fall asleep talking to my mother in the darkness of my bedroom, telling her about the day’s events, my adventures at school, and the things I had been taught. I couldn’t hear her voice or feel her touch, but her radiance and her warmth haunted every corner of our home, and I believed, with the innocence of those who can still count their age on their ten fingers, that if I closed my eyes and spoke to her, she would be able to hear me wherever she was. Sometimes my father would listen to me from the dining room, crying in silence.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

‘Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,’ Clara explained, ‘the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

My voice, rather stiff at first, slowly became more relaxed, and soon I forgot myself and was submerged once more into the narrative, discovering cadences and turns of phrase that flowed like musical motifs, riddles made of timbre and pauses I had not noticed during my first reading. New details, strands of images and fantasy appeared between the lines, and new shapes revealed themselves, like the structure of a building looked at from different angles.

Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

That year autumn blanketed Barcelona with fallen leaves that rippled through the streets like silvery scales.

Cinemas are full of lonely people, I thought. Like me.

The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping which steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.’

Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.’

The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.’

He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.’

Don’t be offended, but sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger than someone you know. Why is that?’ I shrugged. ‘Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as they wish us to be.’

I then saw myself through her eyes: just an innocent boy who thought he had conquered the world in an hour but didn’t realize he could lose it again in an instant.

those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

He walked slowly, saying goodbye to every door, to every street corner, wondering whether the illusions of time would turn out to be true and that in days to come he would be able to remember only the good things, and forget the solitude that had so often hounded him in those streets.

the best thing to do was let the water flow; in time the river would carry the bad blood away.

It’s funny how we judge others and don’t realize the extent of our own disdain until the ones we love are no longer there, until they are taken from us.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.