Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

Memories are worse than bullets.

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

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

But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

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.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.

One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.

. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?" “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.