Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

If you ever have a daughter—a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's Murphy's Law that sooner or later she will break your heart—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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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...

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.''Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like 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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

One mustn't dream of one's future, one must earn it.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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 ...

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

...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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón