811 Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills.Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.

People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

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. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

Jorge siempre viviría a la sombra de su privilegio, entre algodones y fracasos. Penélope, la preciosa Penélope, era mujer y por tanto tesoro, no tesorero. Julián, que tenía alma de poeta, y por tanto de asesino, reunía las cualidades.

Wariatem jest ten, kto ma się za całkowicie normalnego, a za nienormalnych uważa całą resztę.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.