Quotes from Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

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.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

En ese momento, con esa certeza que sólo se tiene un par de veces en la vida, supe que iba a pasar el resto de mi vida a su lado.

Do you want to set fire to the whole world and burn with it? Let's do it together. You fix the price.

She wore an ivory-white dress and held the world in her eyes. I barely remember the priest's words or the faces of the guests, full of hope, who filled the church on that March morning. All that remains in my memory is the touch of her lips and, when I half opened my eyes, the secret oath I carried with me and would remember all the days of my life.

Viviamo nel ricordo di chi ci ama

The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population, he would remark. And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.

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 & they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

En un universo infinito hay demasiadas cosas que se escapan a la comprensión humana

Martin, fables are possibly one of the most interesting literary forms ever invented. Do you know what they teach us? Moral lessons? No. They teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

Damals wusste ich nicht, dass der Ozean der Zeit früher oder später die Erinnerungen anschwemmt, die wir in ihm versenkt haben.

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

lo que cuenta a veces no es lo que se da, sino lo que se cede. La sombra del viento

Ein Geheimnis ist soviel wert wie der der es uns anvertraut.

a principal diferença entre um homem e uma mulher é que um homem põe sempre o estomago à frente do coração. Uma mulher faz sempre o contrário.

Cdo liber, cdo vellim qe shikon ketu ka shpirtin e vet, shpirtin e atij qe e ka shkruar dhe te atyre qe e kane lexuar, te atij qe ka jetuar e te atij qe ka enderruar permes tij. Sa here qe nje liber nderron zot, sa here qe nje veshtrim i ri fluturon mbi fletet e tij, shpirti i librit rimerr fuqi.

Leger, huwelijk, kerk en bankwezen: de vier ruiters van de apocalyps.

I ricordi che seppellisci nel silenzio sono quelli che non smettono mai di perseguitarti.

C?rÈ›ile sînt oglinzi: vezi în ele numai ceea ce ai deja în tine..

El plan, o la ausencia de uno...