Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes - Page 7

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

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

There are worse prisons than words.

Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache 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.

I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.

People might not agree with me, but I think a woman should have a feminine shape, something you can get your hands on. You, on the other hand, look like you might be partial to the skinny type, a point of view I fully respect, don't misunderstand me.

People only disappear when they have somewhere to go

Resentment slowly poisoned my blood and I laughed at myself and my absurd hopes.

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

If only everything hurt as little as a blow to the face.

The truth is what hurts

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

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.

Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.

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.

Thunder and lightning, it's like the end of the world.

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

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

I couldn't 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.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

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

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.