Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.

Words can bruise and break hearts, and minds as well. There are no black and blue marks, no broken bones to put in plaster casts, and therefore no prison bars for the offender.

When you're hurt very badly in your childhood, the area that it has the greatest effect on is relationships. Once you feel like you can't trust people, once you feel like that they don't care about you, that they're really not going to take care of you, it gets very difficult in relationships.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

Words don't hurt you." Which is one of the hugest criminal lies perpetrated by adults against children in this world. Because words hurt more than any physical pain.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Nobody could emerge from a childhood at MGM unscathed.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

When a man is hit by Friendly Fire, his blood pressure lowers and his morale sinks. I have been hit by Friendly Fire in my heart. Sighs spill from my body instead of blood.

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

Verbal blows cut to the soul and ate at the heart for eternity.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.

There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

It's a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real.

Adults are just children sometimes. But evil, hurt children.