Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes page 2

“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.”

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Variant: The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“Coincidences are the scars of fate.”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)

“People only disappear when they have somewhere to go”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: Marina

“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.”

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

“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.”

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

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

Source: The Angel's Game

“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.”

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Midnight Palace

Source: The Midnight Palace

“Waiting is the rust of the soul.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“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.”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

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

Source: The Angel's Game

“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.”

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

“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.”

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

“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”

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: Marina

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

Source: Marina

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

Variant: We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.
Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: Marina

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”

Source: Marina

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Prisoner of Heaven

“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.”

Source: The Angel's Game

“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.”

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”

Source: Marina

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

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

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

Source: Marina

“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.”

Source: The Angel's Game

“I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.”

Source: The Angel's Game

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

Source: The Angel's Game