Carlos Ruiz Zafón · 487 pages
Rating: (344.5K votes)
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“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 time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?"
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“To truly hate is an art one learns with time.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“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.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“Man...heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand...heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, quote from The Shadow of the Wind
“It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“A round moon stood low in the sky, pale still, and smudged with shadow, and thin at one edge like a worn coin. There was a scatter of small stars, with here and there the shepherd stars herding them, and across from the moon one great star alone, burning white. The shadows were long and soft on the seeding grasses. A”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Crystal Cave
“Here I had a strange idea not unworthy of de Selby. Why was Joe so disturbed at the suggestion that he had a body? What if he had a body? A body with another body inside it in turn, thousands of such bodies within each other like the skins of an onion, receding to some unimaginable ultimum? Was I in turn merely a link in a vast sequence of imponderable beings, the world I knew merely the interior of the being whose inner voice I myself was? Who or what was the core and what monster in what world was the final uncontained colossus? God? Nothing? Was I receiving these wild thoughts from Lower Down or were they brewing newly in me to be transmitted Higher Up?”
― Flann O'Brien, quote from The Third Policeman
“Lay not the blame on me, O sailor, but on the winds. By nature I am as calm and safe as the land itself, but the winds fall upon me with their gusts and gales, and lash me into a fury that is not natural to me.”
― Aesop, quote from Aesop's Fables
“Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.”
― Joe Haldeman, quote from The Forever War
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