Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes - Page 3

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough

1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

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.

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.

Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.

Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.

Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time.

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.

It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.

1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.

Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.

Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.

If there is a god, or hundreds of them, I hope they will forgive me for the harm I may have inflicted on you by telling you exactly what happened.

History is biology's dumping ground

Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.

Making money isn't hard in itself,what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.

In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

... 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.

Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots.I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions.

future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. 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.

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. … It’s difficult to hate an idea. … It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group … anything.

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

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.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.

Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.

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

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

Some disappointments honor those who inspire them

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.

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 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.