Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.

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

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.

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.

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.

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.

It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.

somethings can only be seen in the shadows

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.

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.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

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.

The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.