Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“Pasamos la mayor parte de nuestra vida soñando, sobre todo cuando estamos despiertos”

“She said 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.”

“Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.”

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

“Don't say another word. If you think you're the only person for whom life is painful, you're wrong. And if you don't mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care- although, to tell the truth, I don't see why.”

“He didn't know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay.”

“He was truly a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things, and in something to which he didn't dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job.”

“Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.”

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

“Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.”

“One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.”

“Perhaps part of your problem is that you've been reading the commentators and not the people they were commenting on. A common mistake but fatal when you're trying to learn something.”

“Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? Corelli asked. 'Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?”

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

“Tell me Ignatius B., who has broken your heart and left you so angry?”

“Stupidity is almost always in the eye of the beholder.”

“I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.”

“Better still, I pay you. And I pay you very well, which is the only real form of flattery in this whorish world.”

“An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect. He claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual.”

“El destino suele estar a la vuelta de la esquina. Como si fuese un chorizo, una furcia o un vendedor de lotería: sus tres encarnaciones más socorridas. Pero lo que no hace es visitas a domicilio. Hay que ir a por él.-Fermín Romero de Torres.”

“El dinero es como cualquier otro virus: una vez que pudre el alma del que lo alberga, parte en busca de sangre fresca.”

“Mucho ir a misa, pero a nuestro señor Jesucristo aquí no le hace caso ni Dios”

“La televisión es el Anticristo y le digo yo que bastarán tres o cuatro generaciones para que la gente ya no sepa ni tirarse pedos por su cuenta y el ser humano vuelva a la caverna, a la barbarie medieval, y a estados de imbecilidad que ya superó la babosa allá por el pleistoceno. Este mundo no se morirá de una bomba atómica como dicen en los diarios, se morirá de risa, de banalidad, haciendo un chiste de todo, y además un chiste malo.”

“He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.”

“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.”

“I carried the trace of her lips, of her breath on my skin through streets full of faceless people escaping from offices and shops.”

“Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. 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.”

“En esta vida lo único que sienta cátedra es el prejuicio.”

“Nunca de fíes de nadie, especialmente de la gente a la que admiras. Ésos son los que te pegarán las peores puñaladas.”

“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.”

“There was another silence, of the kind in which gray hairs seem to creep up on you.”

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.”

“Er zijn ergere gevangenissen dan woorden.”

“The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population," he would remark. "And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.”

“Armee, Ehe, Kirche und Bankwesen: die vier apokalyptischen Reiter.”

“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.”

“...anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don't. Whoever says that's not true is lying through his teeth.”

“If you think you’re the only person for whom life is painful, you’re wrong. And if you don’t mind letting yourself die like a dog, at least have the decency to remember that there are those of us who do care – although, to tell the truth, I don’t see why?”

“... , listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to one another, and to nobody else.”

“Someone who lives alone, I thought. You end up becoming what you see in the eyes of those you love.”

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

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

“All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.”

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

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

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

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

“It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.”

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”

“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.”