1 I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a shortcut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

And as he watched them walk out of the orphanage, Thomas Carter would think of their lives as the blank pages of a book in which he had written the initial chapters of a story he would never be allowed to finish.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

... And what am I to do?"" Well, that depends. Do you like the girl?"" Like her? I don't know. How do you know if...?"" It's very simple. Do you look at her furtively and feel like biting her?"" Biting her?"" On her backside, for example.

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón