nocturnal

• ➊ “Silence speaks volumes if one knows how to listen.”
• ➋ “ A weapon doesn’t make one powerful, it only proves that one is weak. It takes no power to destroy or try to force your will upon others. Anyone can destroy or threaten, but to create something takes real power.”

pan's labyrinth

• ➊ “Ofelia didn’t remind her mother that for her there was nothing better than a book. Her mother wouldn’t understand. She didn’t make books her shelter or allow them to take her to another world. She could only see this world. It was part of her mother’s sadness to be earthbound. Books could have told her so much about this world and about places far away, about animals and plants, about the stars! They could be windows and doors, paper wings to help her fly away. Maybe her mother had just forgotten how to fly. Or maybe she’d never learned.”
• ➋ “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 the devils …”
• ➌ “To obey … just like that, for the sake of obeying, without questioning … that’s something only people like you can do, Capitan.”

night

• ➊ “They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.”
• ➋ “There are a thousand and one gates allowing entry into the orchard of mystical truth. Every human being has his own gate. He must not err and wish to enter the orchard through a gate other than his own. That would present a danger not only for the one entering but also for those who are already inside.”
• ➌ "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere."

the witchfinder's sister

• ➊ "I have learned that the acknowledged history that belongs to the daylight, that is not the only history. Turn over the stone and you will find another history, wriggling to escape."

seer of sevenwaters

• ➊ “The deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales and less real.”