The Shadow of the Wind - quotations and references

[Kirsty]

I've only just begun reading and I've started highlighting (on my kindle not my paperback) so I know it's going to be one of those books that is rich and deserves to be quoted. Add your quotes here and any references you may notice.

[Kirsty]

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”

[Kirsty]

“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”

[Sam (VanillaFountain)]

'The lead? Me?''What do you expect? One has to pay some price for being able to piss standing up.'

I Love Fermin Romero de Torres he's made me laugh all through the book, what a character! lol

[Kirsty]

Sam wrote: "'The lead? Me?''What do you expect? One has to pay some price for being able to piss standing up.'

I Love Fermin Romero de Torres he's made me laugh all through the book, what a character! lol"

That's something which really struck me - the characters are so well written. When I got about halfway through I felt like I knew them like friends and I found it difficult to leave their lives and return to mine without a resolution of some kind. I cared about them and not in the usual heart rendering tear jerking way but like I'd known them for years and I'd seen their goodness and their flaws - they'd adhered themselves to me. All I wanted was to find out what had happened in the past to bring about the present and affect their futures. Above all I wanted them to live happily ever after.

[Sam (VanillaFountain)]

Must put this one down too, before I forget where it is
Page 180-

'Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever'
-Daniel Sempere

[Sam (VanillaFountain)]

'Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.'
-Julian Carax

[Aimee]

P176 "he used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us" so true.

[Kirsty]

"I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day"

I love this thread - it's such a quote rich book

[Kirsty]

"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."

This gave me a lot to think about

[Sam (VanillaFountain)]

Totally agree with you there Kirsty, I really had a good think about my boys when I read that.

I reckon there would be enough great quotes in there to publish a small book hehe.

[Kirsty]

‘I told her how, until that moment, I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.’