Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.

Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

There are people you remember and people you dream of.

People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

Sometimes feeling and thinking are one and the same.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.

... , 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 one another, and to nobody else.

Nothing is fair. The most one can hope is for things to be logical. Justice is a rare illness in a world that is otherwise a picture of health.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

You know who your true friends are when things go wrong for you, but the opposite is also true. When things go well, the people who really love you are happy.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.

The truth is what hurts

... deep down nobody is bad, only frightened.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change,' I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.

The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.

Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.

Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.

While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.

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.

One never forgets faces one wholeheartedly detests.

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.

Army, Marriage, the Church, and Baking: the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Fermin Romero de Torres - The Shadow of the Wind.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Everything in life in nonsense. it's just a question of persepctive

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.

They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

There are times and places where not to be anyone is more honourable than to be someone.

I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.

There are two things that I cannot live without: music and books. Caffeine isn't dignified enough to qualify.

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.