Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to"

"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."

"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."

"The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it."

"God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil..."

"Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire."

"Some disappointments honor those who inspire them"

"Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective."

"So 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."

"[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."

"All 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."

"Sometimes memories follow you wherever you go-you don't need to take them with you."

"I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us."

"In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom."

"Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire"

"People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough"

"1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted."

"Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. 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."

"“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”"

"If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?"