The Labyrinth of the Spirits

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Don’t lose hope. If there’s anything I’ve learned from this lousy world, it’s that destiny is always just around the corner. It might look like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor, its three most usual personifications. And if you ever decide to go and find it – remember, destiny doesn’t make house calls – you’ll see that it will grant you a second chance.”

to keep your sanity, you must have a place in the world where you can lose yourself if necessary. That place, that last refuge, is a small annexe of the soul, and when the world reverts to its absurd comedy, you can always run there, lock yourself in and throw away the key.

“Are you sure you don’t think that if you save someone decent, you’ll save the world, or at least the possibility that something good might be left in it?”

“I don’t think there is anything decent to save in the world, Fermín.”

The truth is an agreement that allows innocent people not to have to cope with reality.”

Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colours of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas.

“The first piston fountain pen was patented in 1827 by a Romanian called Petrache Poenaru, but it wasn’t until the eighteen eighties that it was perfected and began to be commercialized on a large scale.”

“A story has no beginning and no end, only points of entry.”