It is difficult to hate an idea. That requires a certain intellectual discipline and a slightly obsessive, sick mind. There arenโt too many of those. Itโs much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesnโt have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group. . .anything.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonThe rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonThey (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonI stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonWhenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonI 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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon