Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illus...”

“nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds”

“Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.”

“He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...”

“Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them”

“The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.”

“Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.”

“Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.”

“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.”

“I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- i...”

“Every piece of that marvelous world was a silent tear.”

“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every...”

“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.”

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

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those...”

“He truly was a man of faith. He believed in his friends, in the truth of things and in something to which he didn’t dare put a name or a face because he said as priests that was our job. Senor Semp...”

“We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighb...”

“future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

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