Del Toro Quotes

The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.

You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.

...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.

The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.

What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

You’ll meet her. She’s very pretty, even though sometimes she’s sad for many days at a time. You’ll see, when she smiles, you’ll love her.

When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or - how - I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I - am, as I am. He's happy - to see me. Every time. Every day.

Power revealed is power sacrificed. The truly powerful exert their influence in ways unseen, unfelt. Some would say that a thing visible is a thing vulnerable.

Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person--it only adds the burden of panic

In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est, the words read. “In our choices lie our fate.

Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.

It was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better.

She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.

In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.

It’s important for little girls to know not every story has to be a love story and for boys to know that soldiers aren’t the only ones to triumph in war.

The most intelligent of creatures,” he offers softly, “often make the fewest sounds.

You deserve better than this. You deserve people who value you. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are.

Mortals don't understand life is not a book you close only after you read the last page. There is no last page in the Book of Life, for the last one is always the first page of another story.

for in the absence of God he had found Man. Man killing man, man helping man, both of them anonymous: the scourge and the blessing.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber. A ghost. That's what I am.

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".

There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which are a new breed we've created.

Her mother said fairy tales didn't have anything to do with the world, but Ofelia knew better. They had taught her everything about it.

Eons of loneliness, and then one day your ellipsis peaks toward that of another planet and there is a gasp of nearness. Wouldn’t you try to make the most of it? Wouldn’t you, too, combust and flare and explode if you had to?

Never fly commercial. That's the moral of this story.

...there's something about maternal love - it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.

The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.

Libraries don't keep secrets; they reveal them.

You think if you work hard enough, you can fix the precious things you’ve broken—rather than being careful with them in the first place.

The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.

Coffee—a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water.

An absence of fear, Elisa realizes, can be mistaken for happiness, but it isn’t the same thing. Not even close.

Sometimes the objects we hold dear give away who we are even more than the people we love.

But I can't be alone, can I? Of course not; I'm not that special. Anomalies like me exist all around the world. So when does an anomaly quit being an anomaly and start being just the way things happen to be? What if you and I are not the last of our kinds, but one of the first? The first of better creatures in a better wold? We can hope, can't we? That we're not of the past, but the future?

I believe in man. I believe in mankind, as the worst and the best that has happened to this world.

If you believe that the natural world is good, then you must also accept its brutality.

Neeva looked at the puddle of Christ's tears on the floor. When the power of Jesus fails you, then you know you truly are shit out of luck

Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything.

Rage is never blind. Rage is uniquely focused.

Only books talked about all the things adults didn't want you to ask about--Life. Death. Good and Evil. And what else truly mattered in life.

To learn what we fear is to learn who we are.

The most intelligent of creatures often make the fewest sounds.

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness…

Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.

Every mundanity of life grows infinitely more precious in the face of impending death.

We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten…

The raindrops were tears too. The whole world was crying.

What is life, in the end, but a series of small victories and larger failures?

Sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.

You’re always just a little too late. You’ve spent half your life battling regrets. Making up for the past rather than getting it done in the present.

Finish-the-fucking-story". "Music!

What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone’s library is like peeking into their DNA

There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.

Watching a movie for the first time is a flirt. Rewatching it, is a date.

Your heart is uncomplicated. It knows what it knows and acts accordingly. Greater wisdom is hard to find.

We're in three living groups, 'cause even after the world's ended some assholes still can't get along.

When the power of Jesus fails you, then you know you truly are shit out of luck.

The proper term is “occultation.” The moon occults the sun, casting a small shadow onto the surface of the earth. It is not a solar eclipse, but in fact an eclipse of the earth.

We're all made of stardust Mr. Strickland. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and calcium. If some of us get our way and our Countries fire off their warheads, then we shall return to stardust. All of us. And what color will our stars be then? That is the question. A question you might ask yourself.

What you fought was a dead man, possessed by a disease.' - Setrakian 'What--like a pinche zombie?' - Gus 'Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape. Fangs. Funny accent. Now take away the cape and fangs. The funny accent. Take away anything funny about it.' - Setrakian

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?

But Felix was no longer Felix. He was a vampire motherfucker.

When she finally wrapped her arms around the girl, the softness stirring in her heart frightened her. It was dangerous to be soft in this world.

Weakness is giving in to temptation. Strength is resisting it.

By God, Giles thinks, it's true: They are not so different from each other. Giles might still, under the right light, bathed in the right water, be beautiful, too.

One must always name a weapon. You cannot trust that which you cannot call by name.

In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.

The world changes, or doesn't. You fight for the right things and be glad you did.

We feel immortal when we are young. Or maybe we just don’t care that much about death yet?

I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.

Since childhood, I've been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing.

Evil seldom takes shape immediately. It is often little more than a whisper at first. A glance. A betrayal. But then it grows and takes root, still invisible, unnoticed. Only fairy tales give evil a proper shape. The big bad wolves, the evil kings, the demons, and devils . . .

She realizes that, down here, hate has no purpose. Down here, you embrace your foes until they become your friends. Down here, you seek not to be one being, but all beings, and all at once, God and Chemosh and everything in between. The change in her isn’t only mental. It’s physical, of skin and muscle. Yes, she has arrived. She is full. She is perfect.

Guy keeps the heart of a vampire he killed as a pet in his basement armory. He's plenty crazy. But that's okay. I'm a little crazy too.

If we don't defend what we love-if we let it fade-then our lives lose meaning. We must declare ourselves of what we are...What we love.

A key piece of advice from Hermosillo was to have faith in oneself. He would often tell Guillermo, “If a road is not presented, you build one.

Carmen Cardoso believed the most dangerous tale of all: the one of the prince who would save her.

Everything in our universe is ciphered and to know the cipher is to know the thing—and to know the thing is to command it.

You never truly know who you are until you get really, deeply hurt.

Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases. I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC

The term “solar eclipse” is in fact a misnomer. An eclipse occurs when one object passes into a shadow cast by another. In a solar eclipse, the moon does not pass into the sun’s shadow, but instead passes between the sun and the earth, obscuring the sun—

Men meet a woman who’s mute, they take advantage of her. Never once on a date did a man ever try to communicate, not really. They just grabbed, and took, as if she, voiceless as an animal, was an animal. This is better. The man from the dream, hazy as he is, is better.

People who have lived their whole lives feeling half-complete. Who never truly fit anywhere in the world. Who never understood why they were here, or what they were meant for. Who never answered the call, because they never heard it. Because nothing ever spoke to them.

In jail you learn that there are two kinds of guys in this world - and I don't care if they're human or bloodsuckers - there's the ones that take it and the ones that hand it out. And this guy, man - this guy gives it out like fucking candy . . .

There are moments..., which usually come at the most inconvenient of times, such as crisis, when you look at someone and realize that it will hurt you to be without them.

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly.

So I have 8 to 10 screenplays written and unproduced. And frankly, some of them are my favorite stories. I have a Western version of The Count Of Monte Cristo where the count has a clockwork hand. I have a screenplay called Mephisto's Bridge about a Faustian deal with the devil. I love them all.

Sauruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I have found it is the small things... everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…

You simplify because you cannot believe. You reduce; you diminish. Because you were raised to doubt and debunk. To reduce to a small set of knowns for easy digestion. Because you are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America—where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.

For brief as water falling will be death, and brief as flower falling, or leaf, brief as the taking, and the giving, breath; thus natural, thus brief, my love, is grief. —CONRAD AIKEN It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway. —PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

[...]Entonces alguien me puso una mano en el hombro. Di un salto levantándome dos palmos del suelo, y estuve a punto de caer sobre Simmon convertido en el torbellino de gritos, arañazos y mordiscos que en Tarbean había sido mi único método de defensa. Simmon dio un paso hacia atrás, asustado por la expresión de mi cara. Traté de controlar los latidos de mi corazón. - Lo siento, Simmon. Es que... Procura hacer un poco de ruido cuando te acerques a mí. Me asusto fácilmente. - Yo también -murmuró él, tembloroso, pasándose una mano por la frente-. Pero no te lo reprocho. A todos nos pasa cuando nos ponen ante las astas del toro. ¿Cómo te ha ido? - Me van a azotar y me han admitido en el Arcano. Sim me miró con curiosidad, tratando de discernir si estaba bromeando. - ¿Lo siento? ¿Felicidades? -Me miró con una tímida sonrisa en los labios-. ¿Te regalo unas vendas o te invito a una cerveza? Le devolví la sonrisa. - Las dos cosas.

For two billion years, the world knew peace. Only with the invention of gender—specifically males, those tail-fanners, horn-lockers, chest-pounders—did Earth begin its slide toward self-extinction. Perhaps this explains Edwin Hubble’s discovery that all known galaxies are moving away from Earth, as if we are a whole planet of arsenic. Hoffstetler comforts himself that, on this morning, all such self-contempt is worth it. Until Mihalkov can authorize the extraction, Occam’s dogs need bones on which to chew.

Morbid, but not passive. “I was speaking at a film school in Hollywood, and I said to them, ‘Go have a life. Live. Get laid, get into a bar fight. Get knifed in the fucking thorax. Lose all your money. Make all your money back. Jump into a train.’ When I was just a child, I was observing the world, but I lived a lot, too. We used to break into abandoned houses. We explored the entire sewer system of Guadalajara on foot. And then I became really crazy as a teenager.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.