811 Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one's soul and never goes away. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks.

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.

Sometimes, the things that are the most real only happen in one's imagination, Oscar, she said. We only remember what never really happened.

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.

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 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.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design.""You say this as if you envied him.""There are worse prisons than words.