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Envy is the religion of the mediocre

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Age: 55 †
Born: 1964
Born: September 25
Died: 2020
Died: June 19
Novelist
Publicist
Screenwriter
Barcelona
Spain
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Religion
Mediocre
Envy

More quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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It is 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 own lives or the absence of meaning.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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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 Zafon
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The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And its a woman whos extremely vain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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Where he had failed, I would triumph. Where he had lost his way, I would find the path out of the labyrinth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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For some reason, I never felt the need to have kids. My wife feels the same. We don't feel a void. I don't think they would give my life meaning. I do think of the books as my children, though. Whatever is inside of me, I put into my books.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that? “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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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 Zafon
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I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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I prefer you like this, when you're in a foul mood, because you tell the truth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
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It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon