Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch's soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

It’s not that the actual suffering is so great—though it’s bad enough—but the men seem such big helpless children, and the women so impersonal—little Atlases under a load they know will crush them out at last, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t conscious any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill.

Anybody who says they're bitter is sick in their soul. They've given up.

I thought I was dead inside.

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

Why do I even dare to think I could dream I could imagine I could hope?!

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.

I had this lump in my throat, but I couldn't even cry. I thought, I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. I was just sitting there in my car that I was two months behind on payments for, knowing I didn't have money for rent.

I left her there crying as I walked toward the gate. A piece of my soul had died when Dimitri had fallen. Turning my back on her now, I felt another piece die as well. Soon there wouldn't be anything left inside me.

Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was hope

the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on

I'm a lost soul. We do wail.

The dull pain of truth weights my soul, pulling it under. I am left hopelessly awake.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul.