Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes
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Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.
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Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It's our hand on the remote. There's a world out there outside the tube.
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Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
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Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.
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A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.
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I don't belong to any side. What's more, I think flags are nothing but painted rags that represent rancid emotions. Just seeing someone wrapped up in one of them, spewing out hymns, badges and speeches, gives me the runs. I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself
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The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.
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Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.
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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.
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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.
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A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.
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You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.
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Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.
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You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.
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I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.
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The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
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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.
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A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.
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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.
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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.
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People only disappear when they have somewhere to go
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I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.
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Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.
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Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.
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God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil.
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There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
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Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.
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Envy is the religion of the mediocre
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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.
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We all give up great expectations along the way.
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