Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didnt stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldnt notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.

Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. 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. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what weve seen, what weve done, what weve learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. 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.p. 428

Every self-respecting act of persuasion must find appeal to curiosity, then to vanity, and lastly to kindness or remorse. Isabella looked down and slowly nodded.

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesnt go away.

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, wed never be able to choose our own destiny.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isnt complicated enough

Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didnt manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

Mans meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.