white nights

“I don’t trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It’s a sure sign that they don’t really know anyone.”

“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.”

“so long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.”

“Julián had once told me that a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise. For some time now, Julián had been wondering whether he’d gone out of his mind. Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist on convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?”

“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”

“Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to under- stand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.”

“Some disappointments honor those who inspire them.”

“Making money isn’t hard in itself,” he complained. “What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”

“Her small, neat writing reminded me of her impeccable desk. Perhaps she had been trying to find in these words the peace and safety that life had not granted her.”

“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 toward 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.”

“It’s funny how we judge oth- ers and don’t realize the extent of our disdain until they are no longer there, until they are taken from us. They’re taken from us because they’ve never been ours. . . .”

“Waiting is the rust of the soul.”

“And keep your dreams,” said Miquel. “You never know when you might need them.”

“He locked his deeper feelings in the prison of his heart for months on end, until they became hopelessly embittered. He grew ever more bad-tempered and irritable. He found fault with everything”

“Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you,”

“When one is young, talent—genius, if you like—must be cultivated, or it becomes twisted and consumes the person who possesses it.”

“The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the—”

“Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the per- son who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.”

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”