I like to believe that storytelling transcends age limitations.

Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.

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.

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.