Top 296 Quotes & Sayings by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Page 5

One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

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.

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

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.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

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.

In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

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

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.

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

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

In this world the only opinion that holds court is prejudice.

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.

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.

[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.

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.

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

Every labyrinth has its minotaur

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

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.

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

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

I was aware of the risks I was taking, but I did'nt care.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

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

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

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

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

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

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.

Everything in life in nonsense. it's just a question of persepctive

Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.

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

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

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

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.

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.

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

Time curses all, I thought, except the truth.

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?

Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.

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

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.