Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow Of The Wind Quotes

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

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

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

There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.

Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.

The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.

Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

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

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

Few things are more deceptive than memories.

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.

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

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.

To truly hate is an art one learns with time.

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.

Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice.

One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it.

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

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

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.

And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

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

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.

There are worse prisons than words.

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.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Never trust he who trusts everyone.

Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.

In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.

But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing, ' Fermin corrected.

I believe that nothing happens by chance. Deep down, things have their secret plan, even though we don't understand it.

I handed the photo back to her. The caretaker gazed at it as if it were a lucky charm, a return ticket to her youth.

as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.

Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it

Making money isn't hard in itself, ' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.