I told her how until that moment I had not understood that this story 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.
—The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (via clavicola)