“The advantage of books, as she discovered when she was in El Puerto de Santa María, was that you could appropriate the lives, stories, and thoughts they contained, and you were never the same person when you closed them as when you had opened them for the first time. Very intelligent people had written some of those pages, and if you were able to read with humility, patience and the desire to learn, they never disappointed you. Even the things you didn’t understand stuck here, in a corner of your head, ready for the future to give them meaning, to turn them into beautiful or useful lessons.”
―
Arturo Pérez-Reverte,
The Queen of the South
