Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Dopóki nie zrozumiesz Å›mierci, nie zrozumiesz ?ycia.

Se não confiar num escritor de romances, vai confiar em quem?

When I reached the street, I could still feel [her] face, her voice, and her smell, deep in my soul. I carried the trace of her lips, of her breath on my skin through streets full of faceless people escaping from offices and shops.

Finally, in a slow, deliberate manner, and with a calm and authoritarian composure of a preacher who knows the meekness of his flock, he drew the microphone to his lips and began his homily.

La televisión, amigo Daniel, es el Anticristo y le digo yo que bastarán tres o cuatro generaciones para que la gente ya no sepa ni tirarse pedos por su cuenta y el ser humano vuelva a la caverna, a la barbarie medieval, y a estados de imbecilidad que ya superó la babosa allá por el pleistoceno. Este mundo no se morirá de una bomba atómica como dicen los diarios, se morirá de risa, de banalidad, haciendo un chiste de todo, y además un chiste malo.

Cada libro, cada tomo que ves, tiene alma. El alma de quien lo escribió, y el alma de quienes lo leyeron y vivieron y soñaron con él

I tend to believe that the place into which fate decides to drop us doesn't really say much about us. It certainly does not make us better or worse. At best, it just seems to provide a set of circumstances and a hand of cards with which to engage in the poker game of life. We forge our own identity, our worth or shame, as we go, as we play the cards and try to become a fairly decent version of ourselves. The train is the same for us all; we just get on at different stations.

Tonterías lo son todo en esta vida. Es simplemente una cuestión de perspectiva.

She laughed nervously. I don't know what came over me. Don't be offended, but sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that? I shrugged. Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

This is where tragedies and romances began and ended, as did escapes and returns, betrayals and absences. Life, some said, is a railway station where one almost always enters, or it gets put into, the wrong carriage.

Cuando yo era joven pensaba que para navegar por el mundo bastaba con aprender a hacer bien tres cosas. Una:atarse los cordones de los zapatos. Dos: desnudar a una mujer a conciencia. Y tres: leer para saborear cada día unas páginas compuestas con luz y destreza. Me parecía que un hombre que pisa firma, sabe acariciar y aprende a escuchar la música de las palabras vive más y, sobre todo, vive mejor.

We don't betray the ones that want to drown us, but the ones that reach out to us, if nothing, just because we don't admit we owe them gratitude.

He] thought he smiled the way people smile who have no friends, with gratitude.

A good father?" "Yes. Like yours. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.

In the end Alicia had accepted that heavy piece as she done with so many of Leandro's offerings, in a tacit agreement of submission and pretense, where the unmentionable was sealed with a cold smile of politeness and a veil of silence

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not for the merits of who receives them

But 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.

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. As I said, pure biology.

Las palabras con que se envenena el corazón de un hijo, por mezquindad o por ignorancia, se quedan enquistadas en la memoria y tarde o temprano le queman el alma

He begged the Lord to send him a signal, a whisper, a crumb of His presence. God, in His infinite wisdom, and perhaps overwhelmed by the avalanche of requests from so many tormented souls, did not answer.

Si regala qualcosa per il piacere di farlo,non perché qualcuno lo meriti o meno

We're creatures of passage. All that is left of us are our actions, the good or the evil we do to our fellow humans.

La muerte tiene estas cosas: a todo el mundo le despierta la sensiblería. Frente a un ataúd, todos vemos sólo lo bueno o lo que queremos ver.

I'll tell you a story, (…) A story about books, dragons and roses, as befits the date, but above all, a story about shadows and ashes, as befits the times…