“I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Do you know the best thing about broken hearts? They can only really break once the rest is just scratches.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Silence makes idiots seem wise even for a minute.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“We all give up great expectations along the way.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Human beings believe just as they breathe - in order to survive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I'm not talking to anyone, I'm delivering a monologue. It's the inebriated man's prerogative.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Nothing is fair. The most one can hope is for things to be logical. Justice is a rare illness in a world that is otherwise a picture of health.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“It seems that in the advanced stages of stupidity, a lack of ideas is compensated for by an excess of ideologies.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“May I offer you something? A small glass of cyanide?”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“The most despicable humans are the ones who always feel virtuous and look down on the rest of the world.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
“Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Angel's Game
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Born place: in Barcelona, Spain
Born date September 25, 1964
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“When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.”
― José Saramago, quote from Blindness
“He meant you no harm?" said Omoro.
"He acted very friendly," said the old man, "but the cat always eats the mouse it plats with.”
― Alex Haley, quote from Roots: The Saga of an American Family
“Robert was the true steel. Stannis is pure iron, black and hard and strong, yes, but brittle, the way iron gets. He'll break before he bends. And Renly, that one, he's copper, bright and shiny, pretty to look at but not worth all that much at the end of the day.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Clash of Kings
“I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the”
― Scott O'Dell, quote from Island of the Blue Dolphins
“Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Stranger in a Strange Land
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