Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind (2001)

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Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population," he would remark. "And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

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

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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
With women, the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman for the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón