Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

I remember saying that wars must not be glorified, but wars must be remembered.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

People who are anxious to bring on war don't know what they are bargaining for; they don't see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.

I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

Many of the best films made about war have come out after the wars have ended. People need a period of time to reflect on them.

If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.

Why are some things remembered and others forgotten? That is the theme I want to pursue about the Second World War.

Winners of wars get a standing start in the post-war stakes of remembrance.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

I think people are more in contact now with the consequences of war than they've been for a very long time. And that's what amazes me when sometimes politicians seem to forget their history. They don't look and re-learn about what has happened before. Maybe they haven't got the memory, maybe they're already too young, but you can see how we become puffed up, and how we as a nation rise so quickly if we're not careful.

Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".

The more I've traveled to war zones, the more I'm convinced that the impact and the effects are way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.

There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.