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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.

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.

Never underestimate the talent for forgetting that wars awaken, Daniel.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice. In Julián’s case that certainty came to him in a matter of seconds.

I had become used to picturing him as an ogre, a despicable and resentful being, but all I was able to see before me was a kind man, blind to reality, confused like everybody else.

“I could tell you it’s the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.”

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

But the years went by in peace. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

Then I would remember the days when, fantasizing, I had imagined myself one of those women, with a child in my arms, a child of Julián’s. And then I would think about the war and about the fact that those who waged it were also children once.

JULIÁN ONCE WROTE THAT COINCIDENCES ARE THE SCARS OF FATE.

There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.

Julián spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

There are worse prisons than words.

Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist on convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience.

Remember me, Daniel, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.