“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
“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.”
“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”
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“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)”
“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.”
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“Few things are more deceptive than memories.”
“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.”
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“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.”
“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”
“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.”
“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.”
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“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.”
“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.”
“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”
“Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”
“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”
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“There are worse prisons than words.”
“As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.”
“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.”
“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”
“Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.”
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“One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.”
You've reached the end.