Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of the Wind"

It has been my tradition to list quotable quotes from a book I recently finished. Last time, it was Amy Tan's "Saving Fish from Drowning." Now, allow me to share to you some words of wisdom from one of the brilliant writers I know. Get to know him more here.


"In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice."


"That sorry specimen is nothing but a corrupt pedant. A fascist buttock-polisher."


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


"She used to say she wanted to be an author and write encyclopaedias and treatises on history and philosophy. Her mother said it was all my fault. She said that Nuria adored me and because she thought her father loved only books, she wanted to write books to make her father love her."


"There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse."


"'Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting you life to.'"


"Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all remain silent and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and others, is an illusion, a nightmare that will pass. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what really happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour everything they left behind."


"Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience."


"...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."


"Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say- it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that."