Shadow of the Wind

After I've read a book, I will usually save my favorite passages into notebooks or word documents to savor in the future. I thought it was this very private thing that I did and that the things I wrote had no bearing outside of the book itself. I guess what I'm realizing is that many of these sentences make sense and carry the same emotional weight when they don't come with the context. I recently read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon for my book club (which I highly recommend), and I thought I'd post those bits here for a change of pace.

"Slowly I became possessed by the absurd conviction that everything was possible, and it seemed to me that even those deserted streets and that hostile wind smelled of hope" (183).

"Sometimes Jacinta asked herself whether that dreamy peace that filled her days, that absence of consciousness, was what some people called happiness" (263).

"All I know is that those two weeks I spent with Julian were the only time in my life when I felt, for once, that I was myself, when I understood with the hopeless clarity of what cannot be explained that I would never be able to love another man the way I loved Julian, even if I spent the rest of my days trying" (369).

"'Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to'" (371).

"Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice" (419).

"'I could ell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets'" (427).

"Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires" (440).

"We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth" (440).

"Remember me, Daniel, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go" (446).

"'We all love in our own way'" (475).

"'The city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it'" (480).

"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 carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind" (484).