Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

In that case I feel sorry for you.'

'Then perform an act of charity.

Nobody succeeds without failing first.

Senor sempere and I were friends for almost forty years, and in all that time we spoke about God and the mysteries of life on only one occasion. Almost nobody knows this, but Sempere had not set foot in a church since the funeral of his wife Diana, to whose side we bring him today so that they might lie next to one another forever. Perhaps for that reason people assumed he was an atheist, but 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. 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 quite 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 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 pie

When you're young, you see the world as it should be, and when you're old you start to see it as it really is. You'll be cured eventually.

Life flies by, especially the bit that's worth living.

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

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

Nothing in life can be understood until you understand death.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

I left the apartment without even bothering to close the door behind me. Once outside, I faced a world of buildings and faces that seemed strange and distant. I started to walk aimlessly, oblivious to the cold and the rain-filled wind that was starting to lash the town with the breath of a curse.

Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.

[He] taught me that a book is never finished and that, with luck, it's the book that leaves us so we don't spend the rest of Eternity rewriting it.

Routine is the housekeeper of inspiration

The teachers tried everything, even pleading, but Tomas was in the habit of addressing them only in Latin, a language he spoke with papal fluency and in which he did not stammer. Sooner or later they all resigned in despair, fearing he might be possessed: he might be spouting demonic instructions in Aramaic at them, for all they knew.

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.

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to

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.

It's the only thing that brings us together now, you see. Memories. We make so many mistakes in life, young lady, but we only realize this when old age creeps up on us.

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.

For some reason, I never felt the need to have kids. My wife feels the same. We don't feel a void. I don't think they would give my life meaning. I do think of the books as my children, though. Whatever is inside of me, I put into my books.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.

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.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

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

Writing is essentially re-writing and re-writing everything to death, so I spend a lot of hours there in the studio trying to make the language work to paint each picture in the reader's mind and generally deploring how lousy my efforts turn out to be. Like most writers, I suppose.

I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died ... or worse.

My only company was the incessant clacking of the typewriter echoing in the darkened hall and the large clock on the wall exhausting the minutes left until dawn.

A big success can be very confusing if it comes too early in your life. When you are young, you are more vulnerable to vanity. I was 36 when I wrote The Shadow of the Wind and the success of it was very gradual. If you have this kind of success straight off, I think there is a danger you can become an idiot, because you don't have a perspective. It hasn't changed me a lot. I fly first class now. But those things don't change you. If I am pretentious, I was before, I haven't changed. The only thing is, I am less anxious now.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

This is emotional blackmail.'
'No, it's life.

Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy
world a place worth visiting.'
'Whores?'
'No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean
good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.'
We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbour.
'Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the
city?' I asked.
'Ask me another question.'
'Do you have the rings?'
Fermin smiled. 'Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.

If retirement requires a certain degree of peace of mind and an easy conscience, Victor Florian did not appear to have much of either. He held an unlit cigar in his mouth and had more hair in each eyebrow that most people have on their head.

I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?

It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

You can come share a tasty meal of bread, raisins, and fresh cheese. With that, and The Count of Monte Cristo, anyone can live to a hundred.

Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.

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.

She suspected that the old man hadn't shared that sorrow with anyone, but fate had chosen to send him a stranger resemble the person he had most loved, so that now, when it was too late, when he was no longer of any use to anyone, you could find some comfort by trying to save her and give her an affection that didn't belong to her.

Nothing makes us believe more than fear, the certainty of being threatened. When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be.

I know I found his lips and let him caress me without realizing that I, too, was crying and didn't know why. That dawn, and all the ones that followed in the two weeks I spent with Julian, we made love to one another on the floor, never saying a word. Later, sitting in a cafe or strolling through the streets, I would look into his eyes and know, without any need to question him, that he still loved Penelope. I remember that during those days I learned to hate that seventeen-year-old girl (for Penelope was always seventeen to me) whom I had never met and who now haunted my dreams. I invented excuses for cabling Cabestany to prolong my stay. I no longer cared whether I lost my job or the grey existence I had left behind in Barcelona. I have often asked myself whether my life was so empty when I arrived in Paris that I fell into Julian's arms - like Irene Marceau's girls, who, despite themselves, craved for affection.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Whenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.

Perhaps Bernarda was right after all, and in this lousy world, sometimes, some things did end the way they should.

Decent people are killed slowly in this country. Quick deaths are reserved for scoundrels. They kill people like me by ignoring us, shutting all the doors in our faces and pretending we don't exist.

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.

I swallowed, feeling my pulse race, and gave silent thanks that there were no eyewitnesses to my blushing, which could have set a cigar alight even a foot away.

Fools talk, cowards silence , wise men listen

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.

An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.

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.

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.

There would be time enough later on to hide the dead and invent stories. Now was the moment to pull out the knives and pay homage to cruelty. Wars soil everything, but they clean the memory.

Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.

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

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

Perhaps part of your problem is that you've been reading the commentators and not the people they were commenting on. A common mistake but fatal when you're trying to learn something.

Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.

You should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you.

Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

[He] thought he smiled the way people smile who have no friends, with gratitude.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

When it comes to lying, what one must consider is not the plausibility of the fib but the greed, fear, and stupidity of the receiver. One never lies to people; they lie to themselves. A good liar gives fools what they want to hear and allows them to free themselves from the facts at hand and choose the level of self-delusion that fits their foolishness and moral turpitude.

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

Why is it that the less on has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?

Go to hell, I whispered. The night darker than ever, leaned in against the window panes.

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

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.

( ... )where tourists and people from the city came in search of sand, sun and expensive forms of boredome.

Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.

I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace

She described people, scenes, and objects she had never seen with the detail and precision of a Flemish master. Her words evoked textures and echoes, the color of voices, the rhythm of footsteps.

Are you an idiot?
I'm in training.

The success of 'The Shadow of the Wind' made me very happy, but it did not change my perspective or the way I was.

The incompetent always present thmeselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and teh feeble-minded as intellectual.

These scars are the least important. The worst scars remain inside.

One only invites strangers.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

People get so used to lying and repeating other people's lies, either because they're afraid or out of self-interest, resentment, or sheer stupidity, and they end up lying even when they think they're telling the truth. It's the failing of our times. The honest, decent person is a species in danger of extinction . . .

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

Thank goodness it's you, not that madman who came last time, the one with the bullfighter's name. He seemed drunk to me, or else eminently certifiable. He had the nerve to ask me whether I knew the etymology of the word 'prick,' in a sarcastic tone that was quite out of place.

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

Got up to fetch a glass of water and, assuming I'd missed the train to sleep, I went up to the study, opened the drawer in my desk and pulled out the book I had rescued from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul

He held an unlit cigar in his mouth and had more hair in each eyebrow than most people have on their entire head.

None of us are what we once were.

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.

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

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

Good words are a vain benevolence that demand no sacrifice and are more appreciated than real acts of kindness.

If people stopped to consider even a quarter of what they say, this world would be paradise.

It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.

The initial months of the war had left Barcelona plunged in a strange somnolence of fear and internal skirmishes. The fascist Rebellion had failed in Barcelona in the first few days after the coup, and there were those who wanted to believe that the war was now a distant event, that in the end it would be seen as just one more piece of bravado from generals with little stature and even less shame. In a matter of weeks, they said, everything would return to the feverish abnormality that characterize the countries public life . . . He knew that a civil war is never just one fight, but a tangle of large or small fights bound to one another. It's official memory is always established by chroniclers and trench on the winning or the losing side, but it is never the story of those who are trapped between the two, those who seldom set the bonfire alight...[He] used to say that in Spain and opponent may be scorned, but anyone who does things his own way and refuses to swallow what he doesn't agree with is hated.

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.

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.

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.

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.