Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Angel's Game (2008)

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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 Zafón
I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
One is never wholly conscious of the greed hidden in one's heart until one hears the sweet sound of silver.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy moustache 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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón