Cemetery Of Forgotten Books Quotes

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

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

Memories are worse than bullets.

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

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.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.

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

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

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

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

. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

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

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

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.

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

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.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

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

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

So long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.

It’s a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

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.

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.

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

Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

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

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

It's up to you how you waste your time and money. I'm staying here to read: life's too short.

Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.

Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

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

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

There are worse prisons than words.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Los libros son espejos: sólo se ve en ellos lo que uno ya lleva dentro.

I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.

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

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

I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.

Someone once said that the moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.

Alguien dijo que una vez que en el momento en que te paras a pensar si quieres a alguien, ya has dejado de quererle para siempre.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.

It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

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.

Only three or four things are worth living for; the rest is shit.

That day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov.

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

Nothing is fair. The most one can hope is for things to be logical. Justice is a rare illness in a world that is otherwise a picture of health.

Cada libro, cada tomo que ves, tiene alma. El alma de quién lo escribió, y el alma de quiénes lo leyeron y vivieron y soñaron con él. Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte.

May I offer you something? A small glass of cyanide?

I 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.

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

The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.

One mustn't dream of one's future; one must earn it.

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.

Pocas cosas marcan tanto a un lector como el primer libro que realmente se abre camino hasta su corazón. Aquellas primeras imágenes, el eco de esas palabras que creemos haber dejado atrás, nos acompañan toda la vida y esconden un palacio en nuestra memoria al que, tarde o temprano –no importa cuántos libros leamos, cuántos mundos descubramos, cuánto aprendamos u olvidemos–, vamos a regresar.

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.

The female heart is a labyrinth of subtleties, too challenging for the uncouth mind of the male racketeer. If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is to win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.