("The Shadow of the Wind")

[fiefoe]

I must be too jaded for ill-fated teenage romance now, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón's has not one but two. The irrepressible Fermin is of course the best character. The audiobook narration is quite enjoyable.

• There are no dead books, only dormant minds.
• One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't need to understand something to feel it.
• The world outside... feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
• Gifts are for the pleasure of the giver, not the merit of the receiver.
• "Good God, another dam! Those Facists will turn us all into a race of gods and frogs."
• his manners is both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed up in its Sunday best.


• eyes poisoned by tears
• This business of courtship is like tango, absurd and pure embelishment, but you as a man must take the lead.
• The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Somebody's quotes on GR:

• A secret's worth depends on the people form whom it must be kept.
• 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.
• People are evil. Not evil, moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision.
• Marriage and family are only what we make of them.
• Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.
• Waiting is the rust of the soul.
• Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.
• Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our livs fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
• The clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
• A story is a letter the author writes to himself to tell himself things he would be unable to discover otherwise.
• 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 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.