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

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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
It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations—a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he's a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón