Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes - Page 3

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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills.Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. 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. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. 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, a new spirit...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are worse prisons than words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Making money isn't hard in itself,what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicted on you by telling you exactly what happened.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The fact is that nothing is more difficult to believe than the truth; conversely, nothing seduces like the power of lies, the greater the better. It's only natural, and you will have to find the right balance. Having said that, let me add that this particular old woman hasn't been collecting only years; she has also collected stories, and none sadder or more terrible than the one she's about to tell you. You have been at the heart of this story without knowing it until today ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The dead never go to their own funeral.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Few things are more deceptive than memories.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We all give up great expectations along the way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón