Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

If this world hasn't made you semi-mad, then you ain't living in it.

I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for human beings. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.

When you're losing, there's that survival instinct. But when you're handling success, people think it's easier, and they think losing's harder. But handling success, to me, always creates more issues. Are you in touch with reality? With perception?

Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

George, it's impossible to correct a defective reality-orientation overnight.

I mean, I could go ahead and cut my head off in the guillotine, and it looks great, ... Well, now you turn on CNN and guys are really getting their heads cut off. ... As insane as our fantasy world gets, it's nowhere near as scary as reality.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?

Reality is always so obstructive.

I was largely drinking to forget where I was. When you’re in a place like Vietnam, you get to a point where you don’t care any more. You’re in a place that’s foreign to you, and you know for a fact that many people there hate you and will kill you if they get the chance. It really does something to your mind to know that many of the people living around you don’t like you and want you to die.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.