Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Los libros son espejos: sólo se ve en ellos lo que uno ya lleva dentro

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.

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.

While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... 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.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.

Ustedes sabrán en qué desperdician el tiempo y el dinero. Yo me quedo leyendo, que la vida es breve.

It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

A good friend once told me that the problems are like cockroaches. If drawn to light, they'll get scared.

Everything in life in nonsense. It's just a question of persepctive

Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

Do you think it's dirty money? -All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.

Los artistas viven en el futuro o en el pasado; nunca en el presente. Germán vive de recuerdos. Es todo cuanto tiene

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

Hay pocas razones para decir la verdad, pero para mentir el número es infinito.

I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their own secret plan, even though we don't understand it .