Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Time does to the body what stupidity does to the soul

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.

Everything can be forgiven in this world, save telling the truth.

Yo creo que nada sucede por casualidad, ¿sabes? Que, en el fondo, las cosas tienen su plan secreto, aunque nosotros no lo entendamos.

Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum.

Me sentí rodeado de millones de páginas abandonadas, de universos y almas sin dueño, que se hundían en un océano de oscuridad mientras el mundo que palpitaba fuera de aquellos muros perdía la memoria sin darse cuenta día tras día, sintiéndose más sabio cuanto más olvidaba.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

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.

Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

Waiting is the rust of the soul.

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Siempre había pensado que las viejas estaciones de ferrocarril eran uno de los pocos lugares mágicos que quedaban en el mundo. En ellas se mezclaban los fantasmas de recuerdos y despedidas con el inicio de cientos de viajes a destinos lejanos, sin retorno. Si algun dia me pierdo, que me busquen en una estación de tren, pensé.

The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

Una historia no tiene principio ni fin, tan solo puertas de entrada.

Time has taught me not to loose hope , yet not to trust too much in hope either

If you don't know where you're going, you won't go anywhere.

There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

La paciencia es la madre de la ciencia -ofreció Marina. -Y la madrina de la demencia -repliqué.