Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

I couldnt help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever.

Remember me, even if its only in a corner and secretly. Dont let me go.

I cant die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords Ill have a whole lifetime in which to die.

It is a 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 lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. Its pure biology.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

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.

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

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost.

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lords Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living werent already complicated enough.

Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station.

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 theyd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Max had once read in one of his fathers books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that its 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.

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.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

Some like to believe its the book that chooses the person.

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

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.