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. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

BEA says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn't manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

- Boys my age are boring. They have nothing to say and half of them seem like complete idiots. I was going to say that they didn't improve with age but didn't want to spoil her illusions.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

But I couldn't absorb the idea that death could actually walk by my side, with a human face and a heart that was poisoned with hatred.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

CADA viz Que un Libra Zambia de manor, CADA viz Que alien Eliza La Mirada POR SUS patinas, SU spirit Crete y see have Puerto. (Sempre)

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón