Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“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.”

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

“Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”

“A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.”

“as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive”

“You don't look well," he pronounced."Indigestion," I replied."From what?""Reality.""Join the queue.”

“As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.”

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

“All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.”

“Making money isn't hard in itself,what's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to”

“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.”

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”

“Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness.”

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

“Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.”

“Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's 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.”

“Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.”

“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.”

“To truly hate is an art one learns with time.”