The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind

by

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Cemetery of Forgotten Books Quotes

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 the pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

Related Characters: Mr. Sempere (speaker), Daniel Sempere
Related Symbols: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny, but at that precise moment I knew I had already chosen the book I was going to adopt, or that was going to adopt me.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Days of Ashes: Chapter 5 Quotes

I could not blot out Clara’s story about her father’s disappearance. In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety-year-old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. But I couldn’t absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned by hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for walk…and then, in the afternoon, make someone disappear in the dungeons of Montjuïc Castle.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Clara Barceló
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:

Going over all this in my mind, it occurred to me that perhaps the papier-mâché world that I accepted as real was only a stage setting.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Mr. Sempere
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:
An Empty Plate: Chapter 10 Quotes

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 pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking into 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.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 16 Quotes

Sophie refused to reveal the identity of the child’s father…Antoni Fortuny decided that it must be the devil, for that child was the child of sin, and sin had only one father: the One. Convinced in this manner that it had sneaked into his home and also between his wife’s thighs, the hatter took to hanging crucifixes everywhere…

Related Characters: Julián Carax, Ricardo Aldaya (Mr. Aldaya), Antonio Fortuny, Sophie Carax
Related Symbols: Angels and Devils
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 17 Quotes

I imagined Julián Carax at that age, holding that image in his hands…and for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, real only as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Julián Carax
Page Number: 147
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 20 Quotes

Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Daniel Sempere, Julián Carax
Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 28 Quotes

He didn’t tell me any of that because he knew that the miracle happened only once…A thousand times I’ve wanted to recover that first afternoon with Bea in the rambling house of Avenida del Tibidabo…

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Fermín, Beatriz (“Bea”) Aguilar
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 31 Quotes

Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

Related Characters: Jacinta Coronado (speaker), Daniel Sempere, Julián Carax, Penélope Aldaya
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis:

“Look, the one thing that really pisses me off is people who stir up the shit from the past!” Fumero cried out. “Things from the past have to be left alone, do you understand?”

Related Characters: Inspector Javier Fumero (speaker), Daniel Sempere, Fermín
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:
City of Shadows: Chapter 33 Quotes

I looked at that man whom I had once imagined almost invincible; he now seemed fragile, defeated without knowing it. Perhaps we were both defeated.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Mr. Sempere
Page Number: 296
Explanation and Analysis:
Nuria Monfort: Chapter 4 Quotes

It didn’t occur to him for an instant that Julián secretly despised him, that his affection was a sham, only a pretext to be close to Penélope. To possess her wholly and utterly. They did resemble each other in that.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Julián Carax, Ricardo Aldaya (Mr. Aldaya)
Page Number: 383
Explanation and Analysis:
Nuria Monfort: Chapter 5 Quotes

He revered mosquitos and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration…In his opinion, society had a lot to learn from insects.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Inspector Javier Fumero
Page Number: 388
Explanation and Analysis:

Fumero found old men revolting – as he did crippled men, Gypsies, and queers – whether or not they had muscle tone. Sometimes God made mistakes. It was the duty of every upright citizen to correct these small failings and keep the world looking presentable.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Inspector Javier Fumero
Page Number: 389
Explanation and Analysis:

Fumero was very keen on movies and went to the cinema at least twice a week. It was in a cinema that he had understood that Penélope had been the love of his life. The rest, especially his mother, had been nothing but tarts.

Related Characters: Inspector Javier Fumero (speaker), Nuria Monfort (speaker), Inspector Javier Fumero, Penélope Aldaya
Page Number: 390
Explanation and Analysis:
Nuria Monfort: Chapter 8 Quotes

The hatter…had no doubt that Penélope was that love in his son’s life. Without realizing it, he thought that if he helped him recover her, perhaps he, too, would recover some part of what he had lost, that void that weighed on his bones like a curse.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Julián Carax, Penélope Aldaya, Antonio Fortuny
Page Number: 407
Explanation and Analysis:
Nuria Monfort: Chapter 11 Quotes

He hated the man who had caused this calamity, this trail of death and misery: himself. He hated those filthy books to which he had devoted his life and about which nobody cared. He hated every stolen second and every breath.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Julián Carax
Page Number: 420
Explanation and Analysis:
Nuria Monfort: Chapter 13 Quotes

I discovered that Laín Coubert, impersonating Julián, had been roaming through the city and visiting the Aldaya mansion.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Julián Carax, Laín Coubert / The Stranger
Page Number: 440
Explanation and Analysis:

I was afraid of listening to Julián and starting to believe, as he did, that we were all bound together in a strange chain of destiny, afraid of recognizing in you the Julián I had lost.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Daniel Sempere, Julián Carax
Page Number: 445
Explanation and Analysis:

Of all the things that Julián wrote, the one I have always felt closest to my heart is that so long as we are being remembered, we remain alive…Remember me, Daniel, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.

Related Characters: Nuria Monfort (speaker), Daniel Sempere, Julián Carax
Page Number: 446
Explanation and Analysis:
The Shadow of the Wind: Chapter 4 Quotes

It was Laín Coubert, just as I’d learned to fear him reading the pages of a book, so many years ago…I saw how the hand of the angel pierced [Fumero’s] chest, spearing him, how the accursed soul was driven out like black vapor, falling like frozen tears over the mirror of water.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Julián Carax, Inspector Javier Fumero, Laín Coubert / The Stranger
Related Symbols: Angels and Devils
Page Number: 465
Explanation and Analysis:
Postmortem Quotes

I can’t remember his exact words, or the sound of his voice. I do know that he held my hand and I felt as if he were asking me to live for him, telling me I would never see him again. What I have not forgotten is what I told him. I told him to take that pen, which had always been his, and write again.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Julián Carax
Related Symbols: The Fountain Pen
Page Number: 471
Explanation and Analysis:
Dramatis Personae Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Daniel Sempere (speaker), Beatriz (“Bea”) Aguilar
Page Number: 484
Explanation and Analysis:
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