Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes - Page 2

A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

A good friend once told me that the problems are like cockroaches. If drawn to light, they'll get scared.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.

You know who your true friends are when things go wrong for you, but the opposite is also true. When things go well, the people who really love you are happy.

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

Perhaps for that very reason, I adored her all the more, because of the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.

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.

Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.

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.

But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

If people thought a quarter of what they speak, this world would be heaven.

Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

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.

Sometimes feeling and thinking are one and the same.

There are times and places where not to be anyone is more honourable than to be someone.

Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.

Deep down we've never been who we think we once were, and we only remember what never happened.

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.