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.
I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
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.
Mr. Sempere believed that God lived a little, or a lot, in books and for this reason he dedicated his entire life to sharing them, to protecting them and making sure that their pages, like our memories and our desires, would never go lost, for he believed, and made me believe as well, that as lond as a single person in the world were able to read them and to live them, a fragment of God or life would still survive.
'And keep your dreams,' said Miquel. 'You never know when you might need them.'
"You really haven't read any of these books?" He asked.
"Books are boring"
"Books are mirrors: they reflect what we have within".
Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
There are few reasons to tell the truth whilst those to lie are infinite.
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.