Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Unlike the vast majority of people, I've been locked in a box like an animal and I've also been on the receiving end of bloody thrashings, so I feel uniquely qualified to judge which is worse.

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

You slammed my face down on the barbecue grill, now my scars are all healing, but my heart never will.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape - I remember it all.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

You must hurt, or be hurt.

Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

People can't seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next "horrifying" event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound "heals" it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, "Let the scarring begin.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

He would bear scars because of me, as I carried them for him.

Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes. You say sorry just for show. You live like that, you live with ghosts.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I'd not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.

The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.

Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.