Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

Her tiny and organized handwriting reminded me of the tidiness of her desk, as if she'd wanted to find in words the peace and safety that life hadn't wanted to grant her.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Everyone wanted to see [him] fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants had turned into a horde of hungry hyenas
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don't understand it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
History is biology's dumping ground
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Inspiration comes when you stick your elbows on the table, your bottom on the chair and you start sweating. Choose a theme, an idea, and squeeze your brain until it hurts. That's called inspiration.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
... And what am I to do?""Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?""Like her? I don't know. How do you know if...?""It's very simple. Do you look at her furtively and feel like biting her?""Biting her?""On her backside, for example.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil....
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Some disappointments honor those who inspire them
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
[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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. … It’s difficult to hate an idea. … It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group … anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel 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 sound 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. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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. As I said, pure biology.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by lightning, and with good reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón