'Books are boring.'
'Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,' answered Julian.
Of all the things that Julian wrote, the one I have always felt closest to my heart is that as long as we are remembered, we remain alive.
It is one thing to believe in women, and another to believe what they say.'
There are people you remember and people you dream of.
'Perhaps she loved me, in her own way, as I loved her, in mine. But we didn't know one another. Perhaps because I never allowed her to know me, or I never took any steps towards getting to know her. We spent our lives like two strangers who see each other every single day and greet one another out of politeness.
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
In this manner, secretly, the Fortuny family let the years go by, silencing their hearts and their souls to the point where, from so much keeping quiet, they forgot the words with which to express their real feelings and the family became strangers living under the same roof like so many other families in the vast city.
'People are evil.'
'Not evil,' Fermin objected. 'Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought.
The truth is, I never got to know him well. He wouldn't let you. 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. Senor Cabestany thought he was shy and perhaps a bit crazy, but I got the feeling that Julian was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julian lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.'
'Julian 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 of his characters were himself.'
'He died alone, convinced that nobody would remember him or his books and that his life had meant nothing,' she said. 'He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.'
'The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.
Never underestimate the talent for forgetting that wars awaken, Daniel.
Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice it.
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all remain silent and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a nightmare that will pass. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what really happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognise them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour everything they left behind.
I began to dress like a pious widow or one of those women who seem to confuse sunlight with mortal sin.
It was a smile full of disdain, typical of those self-important imbeciles who hang like stuffed sausages from the top of all corporate ladders.
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.
Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience.
'He told me, verbatim, that he was going to beat my brains out.'
'Surely that was a rhetorical flourish.'
With every step I took, I could feel the cold, the emptiness, and the fury of that place; the horror of its silence, of the faces trapped in old photographs abandoned to the company of candles and dead flowers.
... the hopeless clarity of what cannot be explained
God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer.
'Do you think I can't see that? It's written all over her, like a stamp from the society of war widows.
He sculpted his sentences neatly, measuring them out with a cadence that seemed to promise an ultimate moral that never came.
I know the world changes, but never in essence.
Sometimes Jacinta asked herself whether that dreamy peace that filled her days, that absence of consciousness, was what some people called happiness.
Bankrupt and ill, he now lived only on his memories and regrets.
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