Elisabeth Hall > Elisabeth's Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

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

“I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

“Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

“It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

“It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

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

“Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game