Explore Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

Disarmed, I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.

Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood.

Theory is the practice of the impotent.

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

It's up to you how you waste your time and money. I'm staying here to read: life's too short.

Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.

I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.

He (Intellectuals) claims that label to compensate for his own inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

It is part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means - be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our own lives or the absence of meaning.

They (fables) teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches.

I looked up towards the immensity of the labyrinth. "How does one choose a single book among so many?" Isaac shrugged his shoulders. 'Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person...destiny, in other words.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.

It's only worth staying in bed if you're young and in good company.

Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.