Guillermo del Toro > Quotes

“The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.”
― Guillermo Del Toro

“You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“...to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.”
― Guillermo Del Toro, The Strain

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Hellboy: The Art of the Movie

“Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.”
― Guillermo Del Toro, The Monsters Of Hellboy II

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, El laberinto del fauno

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Fall

“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”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Night Eternal

“In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est, the words read. “In our choices lie our fate.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

“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?”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“It was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“Genius is the true mystery, and at its edge--the abyss.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“The most intelligent of creatures,” he offers softly, “often make the fewest sounds.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“In the end, perfection is just a concept - an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Fall

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Strain

“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?”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness -”
― Guillermo Del Toro, The Fall

“video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".”
― Guillermo Del Toro

“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.”
― Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

“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.”
― Guillermo Del Toro

“Libraries don't keep secrets; they reveal them.”
― Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun