Top 100 Carlos Ruiz Quotes
#1. I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#2. Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me with a gentle smile, as if the very sight of my presence were his greatest treasure.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#3. I miss having a villain. 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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#4. We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#6. They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#8. One by one the lights of the city went out, and I realized that I had already begun to remember.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#9. Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#10. Nature is like a careless child playing with our lives. When it tires of its broken toys, it abandons them and replaces them with others," Kolvenik said. "It's our responsibility to pick up the pieces and rebuild them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#11. To paint is to write with light," Salvat would say. "First you must learn its alphabet; then its grammar. Only then will you be able to possess the style and the magic.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#12. Mr. Aguilar belonged to that race of privileged minds who are always right.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#14. 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 ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#16. Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#17. Go to hell, I whispered. The night darker than ever, leaned in against the window panes.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#19. It's up to you how you waste your time and money. I'm staying here to read: life's too short.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#20. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#21. It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#23. Don't add on any years, you rascal. Life will see to that without your help.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#24. Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#26. A hunsh is your brain's way of taking a shortcut to the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#27. You only love truly once in your lifetime, even if you aren't always aware of it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#28. Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#29. 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
#30. My father pretended to be reading his letters. He was a dreadful actor. 'Since when have you liked Wagner?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#31. I pointed to her engagement ring. "I don't know who the idiot is, but I hope he knows he's the luckiest man in the world.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#32. Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#34. We set off towards the square, where a knot of old folks hovered around the local pigeon community, their lives reduced to a ritual of spreading crumbs and waiting.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#36. Do you want to set fire to the whole world and burn with it?
Let's do it together. You fix the price.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#37. I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#39. My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#40. But Clara's father believed that nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds. He had a good understanding of history and knew that the future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#41. Women have an infallible instinct for knowing when a man has fallen madly in love with them, especially when the male in question is both a complete dunce and a minor.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#42. You should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#44. 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
#45. If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#46. She wandered off into the shadows, carrying her bucket and dragging her shadow like a bridal veil.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#47. Men are like chestnuts they sell in the street: they're all hot and they all smell good when you buy them, but when you take them out of the paper cone you realise that most of them are rotten inside.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#48. 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 Zafon
#49. 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
#50. Some years had passed, but one never forgets faces one wholeheartedly detests.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#51. I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#52. In the shop we buy & sell them, but in truth books have no owner.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#53. We looked at each other in the half-light, searching for words that didn't exist.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#54. 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 Zafon
#55. It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#56. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that." Professor
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#57. It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#60. And may you live to see it,' said Fermin, as he signalled to the siren from Calle Escudillers to start displaying her wares.
I saw her caress the old man with infinite delicacy,
kissing the tears that fell down his cheeks.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#61. You're one of those people who fall off a tree and never quite reach the ground.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#62. 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
#63. What I'm searching for is the opposite of an intellectual, in other words, someone intelligent.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#66. It is one thing to believe in women, and another to believe what they say
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#68. 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
#70. Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#71. She doesn't have anyone. For reasons we cannot comprehend, the Good Lord doesn't always reward us during our lifetime.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#73. Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? ... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#74. 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 society
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#75. You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#76. Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#77. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#78. For me, Nuria Montfort was like a mirage: you don't question its veracity, you simply follow it until it vanishes or until it destroys you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#79. Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#80. I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#81. I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#82. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#83. 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
#84. I looked up towards the immensity of the labyrinth.
"How does one choose a single book among so many?"
Isaac shrugged his shoulders.
'Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person ... destiny, in other words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#85. Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#86. In an infinite universe, there were too many things that escaped human understanding.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#87. There was another silence, of the kind in which gray hairs seem to creep up on you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#88. The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#91. Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#92. The echo of voices and old radios rose through these canyons of poverty, but only as far as the rooftops. The voice of the Raval never reaches heaven.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#93. I bent over her and kissed her lips. She embraced me, and we remained like that as the light from the candle sputtered then went out.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#94. Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#95. 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
#96. 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 Zafon
#97. Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#98. Army, Marriage, the Church, and Baking: the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Fermin Romero de Torres - The Shadow of the Wind.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#99. Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#100. I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died ... or worse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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