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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.”

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

“Not evil,” Fermín objected. “Moronic, which isn’t quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn’t stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced that he’s doing good, that he’s always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around fucking up, if you’ll excuse the French, anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality,

“Everybody goes to mass, but nobody pays attention to the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

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.”

“People who have no life always have to stick their nose in the life of others,”

Life flies by, especially the bit that’s worth living.

moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs.

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

“Never trust he who trusts everyone,”

I believed that with that kiss I could deceive time and convince it to pass us by, to return some other day, some other life.

but I was incapable of writing or feeling anything except the terror of her absence, of knowing she was lost, wrenched away. I knew that one day she would return to me, in months or years to come, that I would always relive her memory in the touch of a stranger, in the recollection of images that no longer belonged to me.