Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

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

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.

Some disappointments honor those who inspire them

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

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 belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

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

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

I couldn't 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 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 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.

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

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__r none at all__ith 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.

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 in shop windows.

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

Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either.

[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.