“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”

“I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. 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.”

“Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.”

“Never trust he who trusts everyone.”

“Never before had I felt trapped, seduced, and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. Have you ever kissed a girl, Daniel?'My brain seized up; my saliva turned to sawdust.'Well, you're still very young. But it's that same feeling, that first-time spark that you never forget. This is the world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.”

“What the flower vendor interpreted as 'pretty nasty'was only the intensity that comes to those who, better late than never, have found apurpose in life and are pursuing it to make up for lost time.”

“Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.”