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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Rambla de Santa Mónica

Calle Santa Ana,

Calle Arco del Teatro,

impenetrable aquiline gaze

frescoes

few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a place in our memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget - we will return.

boasted an elephantine memory allied to a pedantry

Els Quatre Gats, a café on Calle Montsió,

frilly

Holmesian flair.

There’s no such thing as a dead language, only dormant minds.

nom de plume

foppish

That’s what I call finding a needle in a field of lilies.

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.’

Aeneid

nouveau,

voleur

Montblanc Meisterstück

salubrious

proclivity

bric-a-brac

papier-mâché

askance,

incunabula

bagatelles.

dint

sycophants

Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

synchronization of traffic lights in Gran Vía,

In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.’

‘The only useful thing about military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population,’ he would remark. ‘And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there’s no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.’

Els Quatre Gats,’

Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.’

Fermín Romero de Torres.’

belfries

pockmark

femme fatale,

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.’ ‘You say this as if you envied him.’ ‘There are worse prisons than words, Daniel.’

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.’

‘Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever,’

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.’

riffraff

Marriage and family are only what we make of them. Without that they’re just a nest of hypocrisy.

lacunae

Womankind is an indecipherable maze. If you give her time to think, you’re lost. Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer’s code.’

A fateful herald,