Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

-Do you think it's dirty money? -All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.

That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven...Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.

The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.

Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.

I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?

One mustn't dream of one's future; one must earn it.

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.

She wore an ivory-white dress and held the world in her eyes. I barely remember the priest's words or the faces of the guests, full of hope, who filled the church on that March morning. All that remains in my memory is the touch of her lips and, when I half opened my eyes, the secret oath I carried with me and would remember all the days of my life.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren't happy and never will be.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

In those days, Christmas still retained a certain aura of magic and mystery. The powdery light of winter, the hopeful expressions of people who lived among shadows and silence, lent that setting a slight air of promise in which at least children and those who had learned the art of forgetting could still believe.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

People only disappear when they have somewhere to go

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

... deep down nobody is bad, only frightened.

Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.