Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes - Page 2

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To truly hate is an art one learns with time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn't manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. 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.p. 428
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. 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
Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
...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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust he who trusts everyone.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You don't look well," he pronounced."Indigestion," I replied."From what?""Reality.""Join the queue.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.''Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The night I met him [he] told me that, for some reason, life usually grants us what we are not looking for. He was given wealth, fame, and power, yet his soul yearned only for spiritual peace so that he could silence the shadows in his heart...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you ever have a daughter—a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's Murphy's Law that sooner or later she will break your heart—anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don't. Whoever says that's not true is lying through his teeth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Senor Sempere believed we are all a part of something, and that when we leave this world our memories and our desires are not lost, but go on to become the memories and desires of those who take our place. He didn’t know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay. Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. He believed, and he made me believe it too, that as long as there is one person left in the world who is capable of reading them and experiencing them, a small piece of God, or of life, will remain” (p. 348).
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keepsuch a secret?' My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and itssorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón