Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes - Page 2

Everyone wanted to see [him] fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants had turned into a horde of hungry hyenas

Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them

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.

The night I met him [he] told me that, for some reason, life usually grants us what we are not looking for. He was given wealth, fame, and power, yet his soul yearned only for spiritual peace so that he could silence the shadows in his heart...

A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.

One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.

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.

But 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.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

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...

So what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.""You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.""That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.

There are worse prisons than words.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

[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.

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.

Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. 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.p. 428

The dead never go to their own funeral.

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.

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

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.

Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.

You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected.

Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.

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

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.

I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don't understand it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

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.

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

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.

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

He truly was 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 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 he 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 piece of God, or of life, will remain” (p. 348).

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.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.

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.

All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.

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.

Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness.

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

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.