Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

Even before I had had time to really think things through, I realized we must not forget. If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

A person without a memory is either a child or an amnesiac. A country without a memory is neither a child nor an amnesiac, but neither is it a country.

If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from, then you wouldn't have to ask me, who the heck do I think I am.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all.

How do we know who we are if we don’t know where we’ve been?

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

We can't bypass our heritage. We can't bypass the knowledge of who we are. You don't take a DNA test to see if you believe in freedom. Freedom is taught, and teaching the Constitution - I won't go on too much.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

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

A community receives light from its history, it becomes aware of itself by remembrance of its history.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.

We're not really afraid to die. We're only afraid of being forgotten. We know that we'll be forgotten, and the idea is unbearable, don't you agree? As time passes we become infrequent visitors in the minds of those left behind. The ones who clear out the house & divide up the belongings. Throw away the rubbish. And forget. If we knew that every evening someone lit a candle and sat down to think – thought about is if only for a few seconds – then we could depart this earth in peace. No-one will light a candle for me. Who would do that?

People sometimes forget when you remember, but they always remember when you forget.

Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking.

If we as a people realized the greatness from which we came we would be less likely to disrespect ourselves.