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

by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”

Novels, as everyone knew, were for women and for people who had nothing better to do. Heart of Darkness sounded to him like a mortal sin at least.

Miquel Moliner saw death everywhere—in fallen leaves, in birds that had dropped out of their nests, in old people, and in the rain, which swept everything away.

“Three saints has my Spain. Saint Holier-than-thou, Saint Holyshit, and Saint Holycow. Between us all, we’ve turned this country into a joke.”