Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by lightning, and with good reason.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There is nothing in the path of life that we don't already know before we start. Nothing important is learned, it is simply remembered.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Justice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón