1
" Najczęściej zdajemy sobie sprawę z jałowości przeżywanych przez nas dni dopiero wtedy, kiedy jest nam dane żyć naprawdę. Czasem te chwile są krótkie jak rozbłysk światła: tylko kilka godzin, jeden dzień, tydzień, może miesiąc. Wiemy, że jesteśmy żywi, bo czujemy ból, bo nagle wszystko zaczyna nabierać znaczenia, i kiedy ten krótki czas się kończy, cała reszta naszego życia staje się wspomnieniem, do którego nadaremno staramy się powrócić, póki starczy nam tchu. "
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón , El laberinto de los espíritus (El cementerio de los libros olvidados, #4)
10
" The initial months of the war had left Barcelona plunged in a strange somnolence of fear and internal skirmishes. The fascist Rebellion had failed in Barcelona in the first few days after the coup, and there were those who wanted to believe that the war was now a distant event, that in the end it would be seen as just one more piece of bravado from generals with little stature and even less shame. In a matter of weeks, they said, everything would return to the feverish abnormality that characterize the countries public life . . . He knew that a civil war is never just one fight, but a tangle of large or small fights bound to one another. It's official memory is always established by chroniclers and trench on the winning or the losing side, but it is never the story of those who are trapped between the two, those who seldom set the bonfire alight...[He] used to say that in Spain and opponent may be scorned, but anyone who does things his own way and refuses to swallow what he doesn't agree with is hated. "
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón , El laberinto de los espíritus (El cementerio de los libros olvidados, #4)
19
" David Martín taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra in search of a musical score, how to analyse a text and understand how it is constructed and why … He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration. He also told me that writing was a profession one had to learn, but was impossible to teach: “Whoever doesn’t understand that principle may as well devote their life to something else, for there are lots of things to be done in this world.” He "
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón , El laberinto de los espíritus (El cementerio de los libros olvidados, #4)
