Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

“[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.”

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

“I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins...”

“A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.”

“Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.”

“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.”

“I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.”

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

“Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.”

“Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world be...”

“I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace”

“Some disappointments honor those who inspire them”

“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 oldes...”

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

“As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.”

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

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

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

“All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.”