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.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

It is difficult to hate an idea. That requires a certain intellectual discipline and a slightly obsessive, sick mind. There aren’t too many of those. 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.

Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.