Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. _ It__ difficult to hate an idea. _ It__ much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn__ have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group _ anything.

Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.

So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.""You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.""That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.

[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.

And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.

Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.

The day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by lightning, and with good reason.

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn__ aware of it.

Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.

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