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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

My father nodded gloomily and quietly sipped his soup. He was a very private person, and, although he lived in the past, he hardly ever mentioned it. I had grown up convinced that the slow procession of the postwar years, a world of stillness, poverty, and hidden resentment, was as natural as tap water, that the mute sadness that seeped from the walls of the wounded city was the real face of its soul. 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.

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

Like all old cities, Barcelona is a sum of its ruins. The great glories so many people are proud of—palaces, factories, and monuments, the emblems with which we identify—are nothing more than relics of an extinguished civilization.”

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

The hatter told Julián that Sophie had left him shortly after his escape, and although for years he didn’t hear from her, she wrote to him at last from Bogotá, where she had been living for some time with another man. They corresponded regularly, “always talking about you,” the hatter admitted, “because it’s the only thing that binds us.” When he spoke those words, it seemed to Julián that the hatter had put off falling in love with his wife until after he had lost her.