Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

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“That day was turning out to be longer than”

“Nothing is fair. The most one can hope is for things to be logical. Justice is a rare illness in a world that is otherwise a picture of health.”

“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.”

“It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.”

“Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.”

“You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.”

“Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.”

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

“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”

“Coincidences are the scars of fate.”

“May I offer you something? A small glass of cyanide?”

“People only disappear when they have somewhere to go”

“You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.”

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

“One mustn't dream of one's future; one must earn it.”

“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.”

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

“Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.”

“Waiting is the rust of the soul.”

“It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.”

“I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.”

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

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

“Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.”

“A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.”

“Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.”

“Our body begins to destroy itself from the moment it is born. We are fragile. We’re creatures of passage. All that is left of us are our actions, the good or the evil we do to our fellow humans”

“Time does to the body what stupidity does to the soul”

“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”

“It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.”

“This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.”

“In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.”

“I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.”

“All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum.”

“All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind”

“Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.”

“She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.”

“If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.”

“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.”

“That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.”

“One is never wholly conscious of the greed hidden in one's heart until one hears the sweet sound of silver.”

“I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.”

“Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.”

“A good friend once told me that the problems are like cockroaches. If drawn to light, they'll get scared.”

“Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.”

“If you don't know where you're going, you won't go anywhere.”

“I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.”

“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.”

“I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.”