Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

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

“Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.”

“Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.”

“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.”

“The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.”

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

“The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.”

“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.”

“There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”

“Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

“A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.”

“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 we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later--no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover or how much we learn or forget--we will return.”

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

“Hope is cruel and has no consequence”

“Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can't let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don't bear you any grudge, that I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to lose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day and that I still love you, now more than ever, even if you don't want me to.”

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”

“Memories are worse than bullets.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.”

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

“Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.”

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

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

“To truly hate is an art one learns with time.”

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.”

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”

“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.”

“I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.”

“It’s a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.”

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

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

“Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.”

“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.”

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

“Never trust he who trusts everyone.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.”

“Few things are more deceptive than memories.”

“We all give up great expectations along the way.”

“It's up to you how you waste your time and money. I'm staying here to read: life's too short.”

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

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

“Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.”

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

“Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.”

“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”

“It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.”

“Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.”

“We exist as long as somebody remembers us.”

“The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.”

“I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”

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

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

“I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.”

“I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.”

“I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.”

“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.”