I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages... - Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

"One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep."

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

"One loves truly only once in a lifetime, Julian, even if one isn’t aware of it."

"People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots."

"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."