Carlos Ruiz Zafón Quotes

124 Sourced Quotes

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 Zafón
A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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 Zafón
If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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 Zafón
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

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

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Those were the words she wanted to hear and she finally surrendered to the temptation of believing them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón