Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.

Be your true self. Because if you're not, there are consequences to be paid.

By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn't investigated. They might find that I don't really exist - that I'm just a hologram.

Nobody really knows what they look like. The mirror shows you only what you want to see.

I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

You see 'awesome' and I see 'lost.' It's very easy to lose touch with reality when you've got that many people thinking you are more than you really are.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

I was unrecognizable to myself; I saw my reflection in a window; I didn't know my own face.

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.

You know it's real when you are who you think you are