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The Shadow of the Wind Quotes
Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn’t a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.”Hasn’t she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?’Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. ‘The passionate kind, ‘ he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. ‘And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
To truly hate is an art one learns with time.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Few things are more deceptive than memories.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Never trust he who trusts everyone.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
There are worse prisons than words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Books hold no passports. There’s only one true literary tradition: the human.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like 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, The Shadow of the Wind
… 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 have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
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 Shadow of the Wind
As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn’t stop to think or reason.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
You young people never say anything. And us old folks don’t know how to stop talking.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Making money isn’t hard in itself, what’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story, ‘ Clara explained, ‘the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. 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. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. 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, The Shadow of the Wind
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren’t already complicated enough.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
You talk as if Bea were a trophy.”No, as if she were a blessing, ‘ Fermin corrected.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don’t understand it.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Making money isn’t hard in itself, ‘ he complained. ‘What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I could tell you it’s the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. 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.p. 428
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The dead never go to their own funeral.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
People talk too much. Humans aren’t descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Remember me, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war…. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we’ve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. 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, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Making money isn’t hard in itself… What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
…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, The Shadow of the Wind
There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn’t bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother’s absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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, The Shadow of the Wind
Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
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