Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

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.

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody__ best friend.

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.

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don__ stop at your station.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost.