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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

The boy, quite naturally, is looking for a substitute, and you, the saviour, fall from heaven and give him your hand. St Julián of the Fountain, patron saint of the dispossessed.’

Julián, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer,

How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

Americans are inventing something called television which will be like the cinema, only in your own home. There’ll be no more need for books, or churches, or anything. Tell your husband to forget about novels.

‘You sound like Rociíto, Fermín.’ ‘Don’t laugh, it’s people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.’ ‘Whores?’ ‘No. We’re all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people.

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.

I sometimes think that life snatches away our childhood friends for no reason, but I don’t always believe it.