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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

“According to tradition, the first time someone visits this place, he must choose a book, whichever he wants, and adopt it, making sure that it will never disappear, that it will always stay alive.

I pick The Great Gatsby.

A SECRET’S WORTH DEPENDS ON THE PEOPLE FROM WHOM IT MUST be kept.

Gustavo Barceló was an old colleague of my father’s who now owned a cavernous establishment on Calle Fernando with a commanding position in the city’s secondhand-book trade.

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

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.

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn’t have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,”

“Fermín Romero de Torres, bibliographic adviser for Sempere & Son, at your service, madam,”

“I say reading is for people who have a lot of time and nothing to do.

Sounds like my mother in law

Some of us have more than one job to do, and time is short.

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

Or give him PTSD

“Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories.

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

I’ve already fooled around a lot, and now I know that the only thing I really want is to make Bernarda happy and die one day in her arms. I want to be a respectable man again, see?

Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer’s code.”

Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.

“Can we count on the secrecy of the confessional?” “This is a garden, not a confessional.”

Novels, as everyone knew, were for women and for people who had nothing better to do.

“You’re going to need a new wardrobe, Julián. There are a lot of morons out there who only go by appearances….

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,”

“Those people have no money, class, or elegance, my love,”

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”

When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.”

“Never trust he who trusts everyone,”

“Making money isn’t hard in itself,” he complained. “What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”

Those were years of want and misery, strangely blessed by the sort of peace that the dumb and the disabled inspire in us—halfway between pity and revulsion.

Wow! Inappropriate much.