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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

Don’t be offended, but sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?” I shrugged. “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”

Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to.

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.”

There are no slips at all ’twixt cup and lip in this case, if you see what I mean.

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

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?

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.