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.

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

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.

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

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; its like the end of the world.