Bilal

“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

“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

“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

“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