Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real.

We went through a long phase where we defined ourselves in opposition to other people and other countries.

We have to be strong in ourselves. Whoever defines themselves only through their opponents risks making their entire programme... dependent on others.

More and more people are defining themselves not by what they are about, but by what they are against, what they are overcoming, the thing that is wrong with them.

You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.

The first step that leads to our identity in life is usually not 'I know who I am,' but rather 'I know who I am not.'

Once I know who I'm not, then I'll know who I am.

Every good work has to face opposition, and the reaction of the opposition offered always helps the work.

My history defines who I am.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.

I believe that everyone chooses how to approach life. If you're proactive, you focus on preparing. If you're reactive, you end up focusing on repairing.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours. Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.

It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.

If there's nobody in your way, you're not going anywhere.

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

We know the only fish that goes with the flow is a dead fish.

Every decision you make ... is a decision about Who You Are.