The Infinite Library

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

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

“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.”

“Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.”

“I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.”

“Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.”

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

“Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)”

“Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.”

“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.”

“After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.”

“They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.”

“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.”

“Few things are more deceptive than memories.”

“Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost.”

“Making money isn't hard in itself,what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to”

“Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.”

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

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

“This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...”

“We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.”

“The dead never go to their own funeral.”

“As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. 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.”

“Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”

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

“Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.”

“We all give up great expectations along the way.”

“Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.”

“Elk boek, elke band die je ziet, is bezield. Bezield door degene die het schreef, bezield door degenen die het lazen en doorleefden en ervan droomden. Telkens als een boek in andere handen overgaat, telkens als iemand zijn blik over de bladzijden laat gaan, groeit zijn geest en wordt sterk.”

“Le speranze le hanno le persone, ma i destini li distribuisce il diavolo.”

“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.”

“If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”

“I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.”

“Why should we reduce faith to an act of rejection and blind obedience? Is it not possible to believe in values of acceptance, of harmony?”

“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.”

“It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.”

“The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...”

“Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.”

“As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.”

“If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicted on you by telling you exactly what happened.”

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

“To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.”

“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”

“Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend? -I can barely remember Lord's Prayer. -A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”

“Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”

“But if you like, you can come share a tasty meal of bread, raisins, and fresh Burgos cheese. With that, and The Count of Monte Cristo, anyone can live to a hundred.”

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

“There are worse prisons than words.”