Top 100 Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes
#2. Every book, every volume that 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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#3. It is one thing to believe in women, and another to believe what they say
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#4. I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#5. Marriage and family are only what we make of them. Without that they're just a nest of hypocrisy. Garbage and empty words. But if there is real love, of the sort one doesn't go around telling everyone about, the sort that is felt and lived ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#7. It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#8. We looked at each other in the half-light, searching for words that didn't exist.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#9. Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#10. He held an unlit cigar in his mouth and had more hair in each eyebrow than most people have on their entire head.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#11. Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#12. I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#13. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#14. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#15. Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#16. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#17. Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#18. Mr. Aguilar belonged to that race of privileged minds who are always right.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#19. We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#20. I fulfilled all the requirements for Clara Barcelo to send me packing, but I preferred to think that her blindness afforded me a margin for error and that my crime - my complete and pathetic devotion to a woman twice my age, my intelligence, and my height - would remain in the dark.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#21. Myths and legends, either about divinities or the formation and history of peoples and races, began to look like pictures on a jigsaw puzzle, slightly different from one another but always built with the same pieces, though not in the same order.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#25. The storm had caused the power to go out; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#26. Don't be bashful; we're among gentlemen. It's a known fact that we men are the missing link between the pirate and the pig.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#28. I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#29. 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 Zafon
#30. 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 Zafon
#31. Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#32. 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 it's a woman who's extremely vain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#33. My favourite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Anna. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#35. Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#36. 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 Zafon
#37. I caressed Cristina in the dark, listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to each other and to nobody else.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#39. Do you like mysteries?" I nodded. I think if she'd asked me whether I liked arsenic or cyanide on toast I would have given her the same answer. "Are
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#41. 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 Zafon
#42. A man who could urinate standing up and without help was a man in a fit state to face his responsibilities.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#43. 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, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#44. 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 Zafon
#48. And for a moment I thought there were no more ghosts there than those of absence and loss, and that the light that smiled on me was borrowed light, only real as long as I could hold it in my eyes, second by second.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#49. 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 Zafon
#50. Normally, the more talent one has, the more one doubts it. And vice versa.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#51. 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 Zafon
#52. Before I know it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that every day I look less like the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#54. 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 Zafon
#57. I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#58. The success of 'The Shadow of the Wind' made me very happy, but it did not change my perspective or the way I was.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#59. 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 Zafon
#60. A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#61. Slowly I became possessed by the absurd conviction that everything was possible, and it seemed to me that even those deserted streets and that hostile wind smelled of hope.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#62. 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 Zafon
#63. Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#64. 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 Zafon
#65. Nobody can really be convinced of something he or she doesn't need to believe in through some biological imperative.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#67. My father sighed, hiding behind the sad smile that
followed him like a shadow all through his life.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#69. 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 Zafon
#70. 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 Zafon
#71. 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 Zafon
#72. He was truly 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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#73. One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#74. nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#75. It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#76. 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 Zafon
#77. The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#78. Now he understood. He had dreamed about her countless times, on that same staircase, with that same blue dress and that same movement of her ash-grey eyes, without knowing who she was or why she smiled at him.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#79. 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 Zafon
#80. Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#81. All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#82. It was a magnificent day; the skies were electric blue, and a crystal breeze carried the cool scent of autumn and the sea.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#84. One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn't aware of it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#85. 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 Zafon
#86. 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 Zafon
#87. Before I knew it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that everday I look less the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. (The Angel's Game)
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#88. There are two things that I cannot live without: music and books. Caffeine isn't dignified enough to qualify.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#89. Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#91. All true stories begin and end in a cemetery - The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#92. Tell me Ignatius B., who has broken your heart and left you so angry?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#96. All holy books are, above all, great stories whose plots deal with the basic aspects of human nature, setting them within a particular moral context and a particular framework of supernatural dogma.
-Andreas Corelli
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#97. Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.
Don Anacleto
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#99. 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 Zafon
#100. 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 Zafon
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