Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon Quotes

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Memories are worse than bullets.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

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

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man's life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn't even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don't think that time passes or that from the day we are born we're all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

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

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

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

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

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

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“We humans are willing to believe anything rather than the truth.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

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

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“-Do you think it's dirty money?
-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

In those days, Christmas still retained a certain aura of magic and mystery. The powdery light of winter, the hopeful expressions of people who lived among shadows and silence, lent that setting a slight air of promise in which at least children and those who had learned the art of forgetting could still believe.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“It is difficult to hate an idea. That requires a certain intellectual discipline and a slightly obsessive, sick mind. There aren't too many of those. It's much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group ... anything.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“The truth is what hurts”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

We all have a secret buried under lock and key in the attic of our soul

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“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.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

These scars are the least important. The worst scars remain inside.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Even then my only friends were made of paper and ink.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Before we knew it, we were walking along the breakwater until the whole city, shining with silence, speak out at our feet like the greatest mirage in the universe, emerging from the pool of the harbor waters. We sat on the edge of the jetty to gaze at the sight.
This city is a sorceress, you know, Daniel? It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing it.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

You're wrong about me, because we can be friends if you let me try, now that you know how worthless I am. And you're wrong about Barcelona, too, because you may think you've seen everything, but I can guarantee that's not true. If you'll allow me, I can prove it to you.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Darwin was a dreamer, I can assure you. No evolution or anything of the sort. For every one who can reason, I have to battle with nine orangutans.
Don Anacleto”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Nature is like a careless child playing with our lives. When it tires of its broken toys, it abandons them and replaces them with others," Kolvenik said. "It's our responsibility to pick up the pieces and rebuild them.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“He didn't know whether we created God in our own image or whether God created us without quite knowing what he was doing. He believed that God, or whatever brought us here, lives in each of our deeds, in each of our words, and manifests himself in all those things that show us to be more than mere figures of clay.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“You seem very sure of yourself, Daniel.'
I, who was never even sure what the time was, nodded with the conviction of the
ignorant.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

Is the sort that breaks a man's heart just walking ...

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“Every book, every volume that you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred, that death could be dressed in a uniform or a raincoat, queue up at a cinema, laugh in bars, or take his children out for a walk”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

Quelle erano le parole che voleva sentirsi dire, e alla fine cedette alla tentazione di crederci.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“If retirement requires a certain degree of peace of mind and an easy conscience, Victor Florian did not appear to have much of either. He held an unlit cigar in his mouth and had more hair in each eyebrow that most people have on their head.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

All I wish is for you to be happy, that everything you aspire to achieve may come true and that, although you may forget me in the course of time, one day you may finally understand how much I loved you.

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon

“He would stare at you without saying a word, and you wouldn't know what he was thinking, and so, like an idiot, you'd tell him things it would have been better to keep to yourself.”

— Carlos-Ruiz-Zafon