The Shadow of the Wind

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

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.

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

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that 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.

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

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.

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.

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

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

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

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.

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

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

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.

. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

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.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

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.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

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.