Carlos Ruiz Zafón > Quotes

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Memories are worse than bullets.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind [With Earbuds]

“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later, they burn his soul.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, El Príncipe de la Niebla

“I swim against the tide because I like to annoy. ”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“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 beart are already too deep.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice. ”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“To truly hate is an art one learns with time.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“We all give up great expectations along the way.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind