Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

La felicidad, o lo más cercano a ella a que puede aspirar cualquier criatura pensante, la paz de espíritu, es aquello que se evapora por el camino que lleva del creer al saber.

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

well, this is a story about books.' 'About books?' 'About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

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.

A wise man is one who doesn't stir up volcanoes, revolutions, or pregnant females.

Poklon se daje zbog radosti onog ko poklanja, a ne zbog zasluga onog ko prima.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love

My favourite place in the whole city was the Sempere & Sons bookshop on Calle Santa Anna. It smelled of old paper and dust and it was my sanctuary, my refuge.

Nothing in life can be understood until you understand death.

una religión viene a ser un código moral que se expresa mediante leyendas, mitos o cualquier tipo de artefacto literario a fin de establecer un sistema de creencias, valores y normas con los que regular una cultura o una sociedad.

Army, Marriage, the Church, and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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?

Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.

Não conhecia o prazer de ler, de explorar portas que se nos abrem na alma, de nos abandonarmos à imaginação, à beleza e ao mistério da ficção e da linguagem.

Time is a great healer. I never felt that Julian hated him. Perhaps that would have been better. I got the impression that he lost all respect for the hatter as a result of all those scenes. Julian spoke about it as if it didn't matter to him, as if it were part of a past he had left behind, but these things are never forgotten. The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. 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. p. 428

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.

En esta vida se perdona todo menos decir la verdad.

You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.

What a mess the world is in. It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.

The business of courtship is like a tango: absurd and pure embellishment.

Every morning she went to the eight o'clock service at the basilica of Santa María del Mar, and she confessed no less than three times a week, four in warm weather. Don Gustavo, who was a confirmed agnostic (which Bernarda suspected might be a respiratory condition, like asthma, but afflicting only refined gentlemen), deemed it mathematically impossible that the maid should be able to sin sufficiently to keep up that schedule of confession and contrition.