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"The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows."
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"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"
"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it."
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."
"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
Explore more quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
"He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ..."
"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."
"He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ..."
"The 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."
"Whether 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."
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