Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

Nothing is fair. The most one can hope is for things to be logical. Justice is a rare illness in a world that is otherwise a picture of health.

People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

If you think you’re the only person for whom life is painful, you’re wrong. And if you don’t mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care – although, to tell the truth, I don’t see why?

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

I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.

The truth is what hurts

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

None of us are what we once were.

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.

Envy is the religion of the mediocre

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

...until that moment I had not understood that this 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.

A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.

In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.

The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And its a woman whos extremely vain.

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil.

Memories are worse than bullets.

Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them.

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; its like the end of the world.

It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.

A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Well, this is a story about books." About books?" About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind." You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel." That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change,' I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.