Bilal > Bilal's Quotes

“يا رَبِّ إِن عَظُمَت ذُنوبي كَثرَةً
فَلَقَد عَلِمتُ بِأَنَّ عَفوَكَ أَعظَمُ
إِن كانَ لا يَرجوكَ إِلّا مُحسِنٌ
فَبِمَن يَلوذُ وَيَستَجيرُ المُجرِمُ
أَدعوكَ رَبِّ كَما أَمَرتَ تَضَرُّعاً
فَإِذا رَدَدتَ يَدي فَمَن ذا يَرحَمُ
ما لي إِلَيكَ وَسيلَةٌ إِلا الرَجا
وَجَميلُ عَفوِكَ ثُمَّ أَنّي مُسلِمُ”
― أبو نواس, ديوان أبي نواس

“But sometimes life doesn’t allow us too much happiness all at once, as if it was a commodity to be frugal with, for fear of hubris.”
― Carsten Henn, The Door-to-Door Bookstore

“The knowledge that you’re doing something for the last time lends even the simplest tasks an air of significance. Never before had Carl folded the corners of the packing paper into such sharp creases, or aligned the edges so precisely. He saved Effi’s book for last, wrapping it with such care and tenderness, he might have been swaddling a baby. Holding it in his hands, he couldn’t help thinking how light it was. A whole life story was contained within its pages, yet it weighed less than a pound.”
― Carsten Henn, The Door-to-Door Bookstore

“He was unaware that tears had begun streaming from his eyes. Viewed under a microscope, emotional tears look different from those we produce as a reflex to strong winds or chopped onions, which prevent our eyes from drying out, or irritants from entering. Yet as far as we know, crying is unknown in the animal kingdom—it’s uniquely human. Wherever we are from, whatever language we speak, all humans cry. From that perspective, Carl had not been human for many years, since the day he had forgotten how to cry.”
― Carsten Henn, The Door-to-Door Bookstore

“Day was dawning when I reached home, dragging myself in that absurd loaned suit through damp streets that shone with a scarlet hue. I found my father asleep in his dining-room armchair, with a blanket over his legs and his favorite book open in his hands—a copy of Voltaire’s Candide, which he reread a couple of times a year, the only times I heard him laugh heartily. I observed him: his hair was gray, thinning, and the skin on his face had begun to sag around his cheekbones. 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. I leaned over to cover him with the blanket he had been promising to give away to charity for years, and I kissed his forehead, as if by doing so I could protect him from the invisible threads that kept him away from me, from that tiny apartment, and from my memories, as if I believed that with that kiss I could deceive time and convince it to pass us by, to return some other day, some other life.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“rainy afternoon on the eastern slope of Montjuïc, looking at the sea through a forest of incomprehensible mausoleums, a forest of crosses and gravestones carved with skulls and faces of children with no lips or eyes, a place that stank of death; and the silhouettes of about twenty adults that I could remember only as black suits that were dripping with rain, and my father’s hand holding mine too tightly, as if by doing so he could stop his weeping, while a priest’s empty words fell into that marble tomb into which three faceless gravediggers pushed a gray coffin. The downpour slithered like melted wax over the coffin, and I thought I heard my mother’s voice calling me from within, begging me to free her from that prison of stone and darkness, but all I could do was tremble and ask my father in a voiceless whisper not to hold my hand so tight, tell him he was hurting me, and that smell of fresh earth, earth of ash and rain, was devouring everything, a smell of death and emptiness.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“My dear, if God had wished to give me wider hips, I might even have given birth to you: that’s how well I know you. Pay attention to me. Throw off those thoughts and get some fresh air. Waiting is the rust of the soul.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There are worse prisons than words,” I murmured. Only then did I understand that the message from Nuria Monfort was not meant for me. It wasn’t I who had to let Penélope go. Her last words hadn’t been for a stranger, but for a man she had loved in silence for twenty years: Julián Carax.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“He hardly kept in touch with his siblings or the rest of the family, whom he referred to as strangers. He hadn’t married and he seldom left the grounds of his mansion, of which he occupied only the top floor. There he had set up his office, where he worked feverishly, writing articles and columns for various newspapers and magazines in Madrid and Barcelona, translating technical texts from German and French, copyediting encyclopedias and school textbooks. Miquel Moliner suffered from that affliction of those who feel guilty when not working; although he respected and even envied the leisure others enjoyed, he fled from it. Far from gloating about his manic work ethic, he would joke about his obsessive activity and dismiss it as a minor form of cowardice. “While you’re working, you don’t have to look life in the eye.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Aldaya and he recognized each other instantly through the haze of the Novedades Café. Aldaya was ill, stricken by a strange fever that he blamed on the insects of South American jungles. “There, even the mosquitoes are sons of bitches,” he complained. Fumero listened to him with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. He revered mosquitoes and all insects in general. He admired their discipline, their fortitude and organization. There was no laziness in them, no irreverence or racial degeneration. His favorite species were spiders, blessed with that rare science for weaving a trap in which they awaited their prey with infinite patience, knowing that sooner or later the prey would succumb, through stupidity or slackness. In his opinion society had a lot to learn from insects. Aldaya was a clear case of moral and physical ruin. He had aged noticeably and looked shabby, with no muscle tone. Fumero couldn’t bear people with no muscle tone. They nauseated him.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Miquel didn’t eat at all. Carax, obviously starving, ate for the two of them. The two friends looked at each other in the sticky light of the café, spellbound. The last time they had seen each other face-to-face, they were half the age they were now. They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The hatter was the man whom the flower vendor remembered seeing a few days before, prowling around the Aldaya mansion. What the flower vendor interpreted as “pretty nasty” was only the intensity that comes to those who, better late than never, have found a purpose in life and try to make up for lost time.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“JULIÁN ONCE WROTE THAT COINCIDENCES ARE THE SCARS OF FATE. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires. For years I had wanted to believe that Julián was still the man I had fallen in love with, or what was left of him. I had wanted to believe that we would manage to keep going with sporadic bursts of misery and hope. I had wanted to believe that Laín Coubert had died and returned to the pages of a book. We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either. Hope is cruel, and has no conscience.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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. As so often happened to me with Julián, years before meeting him, I feel that I know you and that if I can trust in someone, that someone is you. Remember me, Daniel, even if it’s only in a corner and secretly. Don’t let me go.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind