"Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers."

"Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute."

"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."

"Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value."

"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper."

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

"Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks."

"Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness."

"Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool."

"He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to."

"My father says a hunch is your brain's way of taking a short cut to the truth,' replied Max.'He's a wise man, your father. What else does he say?''That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you."

"Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart."

"People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough."

"Don't be bashful, we're among gentlemen. It's a known fact that we men are the missing link between the pirate and the pig."

"Everyone wanted to see [him] fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants had turned into a horde of hungry hyenas."

"Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.''Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment."

"Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows."

"Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them."

"Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sweating. Choose a theme, an idea, and squeeze your brain until it hurts. That's called inspiration."

"The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory."

"Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval."

"Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to."

"He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers."

"Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason."

"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."

"Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them."

"Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective."

"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."

"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."

"All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology."

"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."

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

"To truly hate is an art one learns with time."

"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."

"Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions."

"Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded."

"There is nothing in the path of life that we don't already know before we start. Nothing important is learned, it is simply remembered."

"There are worse prisons than words."

"Some disappointments honor those who inspire them."

"All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air, and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake."

"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 ..."

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

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

"This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise."

"An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive."

"It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory."

"Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself."

"I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth."

"The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul."

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