Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

“Never underestimate a writer's vanity, especially that of a mediocre writer. (The Angel's Game)”

“I was aware of the risks I was taking, but I did'nt care.”

“Before I knew it, I'll be thirty and I'll realise that everday I look less the person I wanted to be when I was fifteen. (The Angel's Game)”

“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.”

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

“All the bad things you do in life come back to you, (David). And I've done a lot of bad things. A lot. But I've paid the price. (The Angel's Game)”

“Mensen zonder een eigen leven moeten zich altijd in dat van anderen mengen.”

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

“Few things are more deceptive than memories.”

“All true stories begin and end in a cemetery.”

“Esta gente que ve pecado en todas partes está enferma del alma y, si me apuras, de los intestinos.”

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

“Miłość jest jak wędlina: jest salami i jest mortadela.”

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

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

“...is the sort that breaks a man's heart just walking...”

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

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

“Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.”

“Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”

“Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn’t even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don’t think that time passes or that from the day we are born we’re all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.”

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

“We set off towards the square, where a knot of old folks hovered around the local pigeon community, their lives reduced to a ritual of spreading crumbs and waiting.”

“There are worse prisons than words.”

“Well, this is a story about books."About books?"About accursed books, about a man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of anovel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind."You talk like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel."That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story.”

“Los regalos se hacen por el gusto del que regala, no por mérito del que recibe.”

“Odiar de veras es un talento que se aprende con los años”

“Una de las trampas de la infancia es que no hace falta comprender algo para sentirlo. Para cuando la razón es capaz de entender lo sucedido, las heridas en el corazón ya son demasiado profundas.”

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

“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.”

“I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.”

“In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”

“Hay peores cárceles que las palabras.”

“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.”

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

“Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”

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

“No hay lenguas muertas, sino cerebros aletargados.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Television is the Antichrist, and I can assure you after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to medieval savagery and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb...it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything and a lousy joke at that.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”