Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There are worse prisons than words.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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...

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... 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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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 ...

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. 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. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keepsuch a secret?' My gaze was lost in the immensity of the place and itssorcery of light. I nodded, and my father smiled.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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).

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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)

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón