Perhaps one day the telephone, the wristwatch and haste will seem old-fashioned anachronisms, whereas here, in a library created before the 20th century, they seem futuristic.

We may find other ways to talk or communicate than the telephone, other ways to tell the time than the wristwatch (if we need to tell the time), but real progress will be to see haste and the driving force of lack of time, dead and buried.

‘There, inventions such as the telephone, the wristwatch, and haste, seemed futuristic anachronisms.’

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. 14

Photo credit: Scott Umstattd at unsplash.com