And as he watched them walk out of St Patrick's, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.
He always poured me a glass of Vichy water."Take this. This cures everything, minus stupidity, which is a widespread epidemic on the rise.
I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.
"You really haven't read any of these books?" He asked.
"Books are boring"
"Books are mirrors: they reflect what we have within".
There are few reasons to tell the truth whilst those to lie are infinite.
'And keep your dreams,' said Miquel. 'You never know when you might need them.'
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel.
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
I ignored the pleasure that the written word may bring, the pleasure of penetrating within the secrets of the soul, of abandoning oneself to imagination, to the beauty and mistery of literary invention.
Mr. Sempere believed that God lived a little, or a lot, in books and for this reason he dedicated his entire life to sharing them, to protecting them and making sure that their pages, like our memories and our desires, would never go lost, for he believed, and made me believe as well, that as lond as a single person in the world were able to read them and to live them, a fragment of God or life would still survive.