Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Do you like mysteries?" I nodded. I think if she'd asked me whether I liked arsenic or cyanide on toast I would have given her the same answer. "Are

We only remember what never really happend

Le destin attend toujours au coin de la rue. Comme un voyou, une pute ou un vendeur de loterie : ses trois incarnations favorites. Mais il ne vient pas vous démarcher à domicile. Il faut aller à sa rencontre.

The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.

Marriage and family are only what we make of them. Without that they're just a nest of hypocrisy. Garbage and empty words. But if there is real love, of the sort one doesn't go around telling everyone about, the sort that is felt and lived…

Matematika je religija za ljude s mozgom, zato ima tako malo pristaša.

Now he understood. He had dreamed about her countless times, on that same staircase, with that same blue dress and that same movement of her ash-grey eyes, without knowing who she was or why she smiled at him.

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk

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.

Life, some said, is a railway station where one almost always enters, or gets put into, the wrong carriage.

Presents are made for the pleasure of the one who gives them, not for the merits of those who recieve them

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.

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.

You cannot understand such things right now, because you're young. But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

where tourists and people from the city came in search of sand, sun and expensive forms of boredome.

This is emotional blackmail.' 'No, it's life.

My father sighed, hiding behind the sad smile that followed him like a shadow all through his life.

You seem very sure of yourself, Daniel.' I, who was never even sure what the time was, nodded with the conviction of the ignorant.

Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not learned to stifle with words.

Some years had passed, but one never forgets faces one wholeheartedly detests.

A veces, las cosas más reales sólo suceden en la imaginación.

Nobody can really be convinced of something he or she doesn't need to believe in through some biological imperative.

I looked at the group of human remains that languished in the corner and smiled at them. It occurred to me that their very presence was testimony to the moral emptiness of the universe and the mechanical brutality with which it destroys the parts it no longer needs.