The collection / 183 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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183 results · Page 2 of 8Play this collection ▷

01Undated

It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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02Undated

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

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03Undated

If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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04Undated

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

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05Undated

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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06Undated

Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend?-I can barely remember Lord's Prayer.-A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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07Undated

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

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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08Undated

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

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09Undated

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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10Undated

Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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11Undated

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

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12Undated

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

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13Undated

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

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14Undated

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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15Undated

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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16Undated

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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17Undated

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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18Undated

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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19Undated

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.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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20Undated

There are worse prisons than words.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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21Undated

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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22Undated

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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23Undated

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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24Undated

To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón / quote

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