01c. 1992 ADI could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
02c. 1992 ADNow he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
03c. 1992 ADI handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
04c. 1992 ADI still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
05c. 1992 ADSometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
07c. 1992 ADThe city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
08c. 1992 ADThe day I charge an unbeliever like you for the word of God will be the day I'm struck dead by lightning, and with good reason.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
09c. 1992 ADAn intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
10c. 1992 ADAll 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.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
11c. 1992 ADJustice is an affectation of perspective, not a universal value.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
12c. 1992 ADAnd as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
13c. 1992 AD[He] was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
14c. 1992 ADSo what is it you're going to show me today?""A number of things. In fact, what I'm going to show you is part of a story. Didn't you tell me the other day that what you like to do is read?"Bea nodded, arching her eyebrows."Well, this is a story about books.""About books?""About accursed books, about the man who wrote them, about a character who broke out of the pages of a novel so that he could burn it, about a betrayal and a lost friendship. It's a story of love, of hatred, and of the dreams that live in the shadow of the wind.""You sound like the jacket blurb of a Victorian novel, Daniel.""That's probably because I work in a bookshop and I've seen too many. But this is a true story. As real as the fact that this bread they served us is at least three days old. And, like all true stories, it begins and ends in a cemetery, although not the sort of cemetery you imagine."She smiled the way children smile when they've been promised a riddle or a magic trick."I'm all ears.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
15c. 1992 ADEverything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
16c. 1992 ADWhether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. … It’s difficult to hate an idea. … It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group … anything.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
17c. 1992 ADI started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
18c. 1992 AD[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
19c. 1992 ADYou young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
20c. 1992 ADI guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
21c. 1992 ADA 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.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
22c. 1992 ADA 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.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
23c. 1992 ADYouth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
24c. 1992 ADIn 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.Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote ↗
