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I can only recall that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn’t bring himself to reply.
I couldn’t hear her voice or feel her touch, but her radiance and her warmth haunted every corner of our home, and I believed, with the innocence of those who can still count their age on their ten fingers, that if I closed my eyes and spoke to her, she would be able to hear me wherever she was.
Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered, while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.
My eyes began to close, but I resisted. I did not want to lose the story’s spell or bid farewell to its characters yet.
I love books written by people who love books
There any poor devil could pass for a historical figure for the price of a small coffee.
There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.
That’s what I call finding a needle in a field of lilies.
I’ve always thought that the best time to read Carax is when one still has a young heart and a blank soul.
At daybreak, as he turned the last page, Monsieur Roquefort realized that his eyes were tearing up and his heart was poisoned with envy and amazement.
It was now a question of stubbornness: if the world was determined to bury Carax, he wasn’t going to go along.
For that reason alone, a book that didn’t matter to anyone changed my life.”
God and isn’t that just the best feeling
Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both a complete dunce and a minor.
Okay very glad to know she is treating him as a child I was getting a Little nervous
bought a copy of Hamlet signed by Shakespeare in ballpoint, imagine that.
HAMLET MENTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THERE WAS A TIME, IN MY CHILDHOOD, WHEN, PERHAPS BECAUSE I had been raised among books and booksellers, I dreamed of becoming a novelist.
HAHAHA real
We read a book and get into reading and we’re like “omg I’m gonna be an AUTHOR”
a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.
“What if Don Federico is no good at fancy-pen stuff?” I asked, unaware that to less innocent ears, the phrase might have had a salacious echo.
is this lost in translation or am I missing something
“And what does God want her for?” “I don’t know. If one day we see Him, we’ll ask Him.”
My father looked at me askance, as if he were wondering whether he was growing old prematurely or whether I was growing up too quickly.
In the scene I had just witnessed, that stranger could have been any person of the night, a figure with no face and no name. In Carax’s novel, that figure was the devil.
I turned up at the house of Gustavo Barceló ready to make my début as personal reader and living-room pest.
Clara played badly, with no sense of rhythm and mistaking half the notes, but to me her serenade was liquid heaven.
“It’s been very easy for you to find a substitute for your mother,” he answered bitterly. “But for me there is no such person, and I have no interest at all in looking.”
anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you’ll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don’t.
Ew
“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them,” said my father. “Besides, it can’t be returned. Open it.”
or perhaps life had decided to grant me a sabbatical from my melodramatic woes so that I could begin to grow up.
“You seem very sure of yourself, Daniel.” I, who was never even sure what the time was, nodded with the conviction of the ignorant.
I can understand that sometimes a husband has to beat his wife to get her to respect him, I’m not saying they shouldn’t; there’s a lot of tarts about, and young girls are not brought up the way they used to be.
oh! yikes?
God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer.
“I say reading is for people who have a lot of time and nothing to do. Like women.
Ugh
He replied that he had no right to love anyone, that he deserved to be alone.”
Poor guy
“Have you any idea why anyone would have wanted to burn all of Julián Carax’s books?” “Why are books burned? Through stupidity, ignorance, hatred…goodness only knows.”
That you’re leaving and not running away.”
Good sirloin steak—if you’ll excuse the comparison—needs
I won’t but thanks
“It all begins with the sincere friendship between two boys, Julián Carax and Jorge Aldaya, classmates since early childhood, like Don Tomás and yourself.
Is HE carax?? what genre is this book lol
I threw up my breakfast, my dinner, and a good amount of the anger I was carrying with me.
“Do you know that you look a bit like Julián when he was young?” Father Fernando suddenly said to me.
Keep saying it and I’m gonna keep believing it’s either him or his dad
You know what kids are like. Deep down, God has filled them with goodness, but they repeat what they hear at home.”
Novels, as everyone knew, were for women and for people who had nothing better to do.
oh again?
“The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián,” he would say. “Except my dreams.”
Hamlet coded
But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.
How old are YOU? I thought you were like 20 now and is she not older than you?? Is all of this happening the YEAR you’re 16?????
My imagination, still intoxicated by her touch and her taste, burned with a desire to corner her on a bench, to seek her lips and recite a predictable string of nonsense that would have made anyone within hearing burst out laughing, anyone but me.
What I want is a woman.”
This book is so obviously written by a man lmao
Nor was she surprised, although she almost died of grief, when her husband of three years announced that he was going to leave her because she was like a wasteland that produced no fruit, because she wasn’t a woman.
:(
The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
They both knew that if they told her the truth, Jacinta would not allow them to leave. She loved them too much.
“And keep your dreams,” said Miquel. “You never know when you might need them.”
