Quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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.

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.

Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We cant 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 dont see whats going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

Ive 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 oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the Rose of Fire.

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 secrets worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

All business opportunities stem from someone elses inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.

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.

God gives us life, but the worlds landlord is the devil....

I couldnt help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.