"Never trust he who trusts everyone."

"Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her."

"He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ..."

"Nothing important is learned, it is simply remembered."

"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."

"But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred."

"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..."

"Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time."

"I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows."

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

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

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

"Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive."

"Nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds."

"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."

"You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected."

"One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn't aware of it."

"Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words."

“The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.”

"I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace."

"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."

"And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish."

"As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator."

"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."

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

"God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil...."

"You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time."

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

"It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality."

"Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything."

"Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away."

"Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you."

"Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire."

"We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake."

"He was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes."

"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."

"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."

"Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire."

"Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear."

"Future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press."

"I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?"

"The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it."

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

"Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame."

"And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything."

"We are willing to believe anything other than the truth."

"He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him."

"Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. It's difficult to hate an idea. It's much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group anything."

"As long as we are being remembered, we remain alive."

"The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words."