Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams

Julian once wrote that coincidences are the scars of fate. There are no coincidences, Daniel. We are puppets of our subconscious desires.

With women, the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman for the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.

A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind

There are worse prisons than words.

Whenever it poured like this, Max felt as if time was pausing. It was like a cease-fire during which you could stop whatever you were doing and just stand by a window for hours, watching the performance, an endless curtain of tears falling from heaven.

Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music

Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.

I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren't happy and never will be.

I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.

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

This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.