Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.

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?

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets.

Every labyrinth has its minotaur

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.

Contrary to what you believe, the earth does not revolve around the desires of your crotch.

A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.

You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.

Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

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.

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.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

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.

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.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

How many lost souls do You need, Lord, to satisfy Your hunger? the hatter asked. God, in His infinite silence, looked at him without blinking.

The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them.

A good father. 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.