The shadow of the wind

There are worse prisons than words.

Presents are made for the pleasure of the one who gives them, not for the merits of those who receive them,

It was a magnificent day; the skies were electric blue and a crystal breeze carried the cool scent of autumn and the sea. I will always prefer Barcelona in October. It is when the spirit of the city seems to stroll most proudly through the streets, and you feel all the wiser after drinking water from the old fountain of Canaletas - which, for once, does not taste of chlorine. I was walking along briskly, dodging bootblacks, pen pushers returning from their midmorning coffee, lottery vendors, and a whole ballet of street sweepers who seemed intent on polishing the streets, using their brooms like paintbrushes, unhurriedly and with a pointillist's strokes.

don't know. People tend to complicate their own lives, as if liv

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.

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.

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

In this country nobody ever retires, not even after they're dead.

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.

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