May you be spared any such presence and any such curse.  Great phrasing though.

‘His presence was both funereal and incandescent, like a curse dressed in its Sunday best.’

See also our celebration of this book, complete with a mosaic of illustrated quotations and metaphors.

Source: Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind, trans. Lucia Graves (London: Phoenix, 2012), p. 138

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