Carlos Ruiz Zafón

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

Future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

... 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.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.