Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

La mayoría de los mortales nunca llegaremos a conocer nuestro verdadero destino; simplemente somos atropellados por él.

To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.

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.

He] taught me that a book is never finished and that, with luck, it's the book that leaves us so we don't spend the rest of Eternity rewriting it.

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.

Vous avez du poison au coeur, mademoiselle.

Don't you remember? Life is waiting for us...' ' I'm waiting for you... Memories are all I have waiting for me.

Los muertos nunca acuden a su propio entierro.

Even then my only friends were made of paper and ink.

un libro es un espejo y que sólo podemos encontrar en él lo que ya llevamos dentro, que al leer ponemos la mente y el alma, y que ésos son bienes cada día más escasos.

Lo que tiene que hacer usted es empezar a evitar que los demás le escriban el diálogo. Use la cabeza que Dios le ha plantado sobre las cervicales y hágase usted mismo el libreto.

Cuando Martín declaró en el juicio que la única buena costumbre que él defendía era la de leer y que el resto era asunto de cada uno, el juez añadió otros diez años de condena a los no sé cuanto que ya le habían caído.

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

El tiempo, comprendió, siempre fluye con velocidad inversa a la necesidad de quien lo vive. Volvió

It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means - be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives or the absence of meaning.

Stupidity is almost always in the eye of the beholder.

Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.--Don Anacleto

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.

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.

I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.

As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.

To paint is to write with light," Salvat would say. "First you must learn its alphabet; then its grammar. Only then will you be able to possess the style and the magic.