The 70 Best Phrases of Miguel Delibes (and Famous Quotes)
Miguel Delibes (1920 - 2010) was a Spanish novelist and journalist born in Valladolid.
During his successful career he managed to run national newspapers, but as his career progressed he dedicated himself to his true vocation: writer of novels.
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Phrases of Miguel Delibes
He became one of the members of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and was winner of several first-class literary awards.
In today's article we will go through the life and work of this great writer through the best quotes of Miguel Delibes .
1. Fame has no place to hold on to that is really positive.
Delibes did not like being popular.
2. Hunter ... I am a hunter who writes; that is, I made contact with the fundamental elements of deep Castile through my hunter and fisherman excursions. Then I learned to speak like those Castilians. And all my books have those characters inside, from the thief of rats to Mr. Gaius of the disputed vote ... We can say that my communication with the people and my language of the people I learned in contact with these gentlemen going there to a different thing.
Extract where he shows his passion for hunting.
3. Modern man lives alien to those sensations inscribed in the depths of our biology and that sustain the pleasure of going out into the field.
His passion for the rural did not know limits.
4. Progress does not work ... if it "has to translate inexorably into an increase of incommunication and violence, of autocracy and mistrust, of injustice and prostitution of the natural environment, of the exploitation of man by the man and the exaltation of money as the only value ».
A useful and calm progress, the ideal according to Delibes.
5. The people are the true owners of the language.
No academy should dictate sentence.
6. In literature nothing is more difficult than simplicity.
The more abstruse, the less you transmit.
7. Burials ... Today I just want to take care of the burials; from the funerals to the Federica, with baroque floats, tufted horses and charioteers with a wig, which is how burials are made in my town. One, naturally, is not against burials. One is, rather, against fallacious formalisms. One pleads, in short, for simple, minority burials, where the one who goes, goes for sentiment and not for education. Perhaps this way it would be avoided that in the funerals so much football was spoken and that, at the time of leaving, the deceased was only by that of which the dead are the unique punctual men of the country.
His thoughts on the last goodbye to the elderly.
8. I remember that day as lived inside another skin, unfolded.
About the Spanish Civil War.
9. The field is one of the few remaining opportunities to flee.
He always waits for us with open arms.
10. Journalism is a draft of literature ... And literature is journalism without the constraint of closure.
A great consideration about the trade.
11. Writing accurately does not only consist in finding in each case the appropriate adjective, but also the noun, the verb or the adverb, that is, the word. And it is in the handling of those words, in finding them in time and properly dressing them, where the secret of a good writer resides.
Great phrase of Miguel Delibes on the art of writing.
12. Fascism ... More difficult than living under fascism was that each group believed to be in possession of the truth. That broke families completely. Some families were broken, others died in the Alcázar de Toledo; It was the saddest end you could imagine for that war, started as a joke in North Africa ... I think Spain fucked up a long time ago; I did not have the age to judge when Spain was screwed, but they did fuck it up with each other. There is no apology that was the right or was the left. Between the two they fucked Spain.
Historical-political reflection.
13. Fidelity ... I've been faithful to a newspaper, a girlfriend, some friends, everything I've felt good about. I have been faithful to my journalistic passion, to the hunt ... The same thing that I did as a kid I have done it more, with greater perfection, with greater sensitivity, with greater bad feeling. I have always done the same.
On the concept of fidelity, which remains unchanged in its being.
14. Glory is a problem of years, since it is time that decides which author is destined to be forgotten and which one is destined to endure.
A piece of luck may also be necessary.
15. The language is born of the people; I will return to him, who will be founded with him because the people are the true owners of the language.
A true expert in the domain of the Spanish language.
16. Death ...I have the impression since I was a child that I was threatened by death; not mine, but the death of those who depended. I was a raptor of four or six years but I was afraid that I would lack those who provided me with elements to live, my parents.
About the middle to the death of your loved ones.
17. The novel is an attempt to explore the human heart from an idea that is almost always the same told with a different environment.
Reflections of Delibes on the narrative fact.
18. He had a frothy imagination.
Lady's extract in red on gray background.
19. The doctor's face was chalky, disheveled.
A description about a secondary character.
20. Loss is one of the motives of the writer.
Grief can help us write.
21. Literature ... It has been an authentic dedication. I found in her the refuge that I did not find so perfect in the cinema or in the cafe or in the game; the relationship of two was perfectly established between a person and a book. My eagerness to write was to try to communicate to two people, to use the pen as an element of communication with others. Writing is communicating with another.
The romantic fact of written communication.
22. Life was the worst known tyrant.
The gray facet of existence.
23. He forgot the air stagnant in his brain.
Another small fragment of Lady in red on gray background.
24. The most positive thing that has been demonstrated with regimes of force, whether of the left or the right, is that it is not enough for man to live. Men need closer and personal attention.
25. Men are made. The mountains are already made.
Geography comes from yesteryear.
26. The protagonists of my stories are beings pressured by the social environment, losers, victims of ignorance, politics, organization, violence or money.
A look at the common points of his literary work.
27. My greatest wish would be that this Grammar [of the Royal Academy, 2010] was definitive, that it reached the people, that it merged with it, since, in short, the people are the true owners of the language.
The purity of cultural fusion.
28. My homeland is childhood.
Where one feels comfortable and protected, childhood.
29. My life as a writer would not be as it is if it were not based on an inalterable moral background. Ethics and aesthetics have shaken hands in all aspects of my life.
On the ethics of their stories.
30. My peasants, my land ... To the initial roots that bound me to my city, I had to add other new ones that I could never disarm: my dear dead, my family, my friends, my North of Castile, my School of Commerce, my streets every day, my peasants, my land ....
On its Castilian roots.
31. There were always poor and rich, Mario, and obligation of those who, thank God, we have enough, it is to help those who do not have it, but you immediately to amend the plan, you find flaws even in the Gospel.
A sample of ideological position.
32. I am not a writer who hunts, but a hunter who writes ... I am an ecologist who writes and hunts.
Great self-definition
33. To write a good book I do not consider it essential to know Paris or have read the Quixote. Cervantes, when he wrote Don Quixote, had not yet read it.
Ironic reflection on experience and talent.
34. Journalism ... Defects of the contemporary journalist? The desire for curiosity, to get things out of control. They asked me about the Civil War and then about my fondness for hunting partridges. And the headline was that Miguel Delibes repented of the blood spilled as if I had gone around firing shots in the neck. It was not known if he was sorry for the partridges he had killed or the soldiers that could have fallen under my hypothetical shots. But I'm not spiteful. I have always said that I am a simple man who writes simply.
The art of writing is to reach people.
35. First I knew my province, later I loved her and, finally, when I saw her harassed by pettiness and injustice, I tried to defend her. For eight decades I had to endure that Valladolid and Castile were accused of being centralists, when, strictly speaking, they were the first victims of centralism ... And when the circumstances worsened and the law of silence prevailed in the country, I moved to books my concern for mine. And not only to defend its economy but to claim the peasant, our farmer, his pride, his dignity, the wise use of our language.
His origins formed his literary spirit.
36. Feelings that nested seven decades ago in the heart of my characters: solidarity, tenderness, mutual respect, love; the conviction that every being has come to this world to alleviate the loneliness of another being.
The moral and vital principles of the characters of Delibes.
37. If the sky of Castile is so high, it is because the peasants raised it from so much looking at it.
Funny reflection on his native land.
38. We tend to reduce language, to simplify it. It's hard to put together a sentence. In this way, those who talk a lot, stumble a lot, and those who measure their words are moving away from the problem.
We are lazy with the way we use language.
39. Valladolid and Castilla ... Here is a certain fact: when I made the decision to write, literature and the feeling of my land were overlapping. Valladolid and Castilla would be the background and the motive of my books in the future ..., of them I have taken not only the characters, scenarios and arguments of my novels, but also the words with which they have been written ... Those voices that They lulled my childhood were the germ of my future expression.
Another reflection of Miguel Delibes about his peasant origin.
40. Finished life ... The hunter who writes is finished while the writer who hunts ... I ended up as I had always imagined: unable to overthrow a red partridge or write a page with professionalism.
A poetic phrase where it describes its decline.
41. Sex must be mystery and personal discovery.
Feudo of oneself and nobody else.
42. There are things that the human will is not able to control.
We are, at times, slaves to our emotions.
43. And they put in their memories some notes of pulsating reality.
Excerpt from El camino, one of his works.
44. He warned that children have ineluctably the guilt of those things that nobody is to blame for.
From the same work as the previous extract.
45. Madrid scares me, because if Valladolid seems like a huge parking lot, Madrid seems to me five times that parking lot.
Sarcastic thought about the Spanish capital.
46. I have not been as much myself as the characters that I represented in this literary carnival. They are, then, in good part my biography.
In each character there is a bit of his personality.
47. The question is not whether the hunt is cruel or it is not, but what hunting procedures are admissible and what others are not.
Ethical reflection on the practice of hunting.
48. In life you have been getting many things, but you have failed in the essential, that is, you have failed. That idea depresses you deeply.
You can be successful and at the same time feel unsuccessful in essential matters.
49. Perhaps it was her ability to surprise what dazzled me about her, which over the years kept me tenaciously in love with her.
About one of his loves.
50. He thought that the story could be repeated, and he slept lulled by the sensation that the effluvia of a placid and strange bliss enveloped him.
Another fragment of his novel El camino.
51. It hurt him that the events passed with that facility to be memories; to notice the bitter feeling that nothing, nothing of the past, could be repeated.
52. The artist does not know who pushes him, what his reference is, why he writes or why he paints, why he would stop doing it. In my case it was quite clear. I wrote for her. And when his trial failed, I missed the reference. I stopped doing it, I stopped writing, and this situation lasted for years. At that time I thought sometimes that everything was over.
Words of frustration when his wife died.
53. I doubt very much that in my books there is only one hero; they are all antiheroes, but, at the same time, they are all wrapped in a warm gaze of understanding. I have tried to endow them with humanity and tenderness. A tenderness that is not always on the surface, because many of my characters are primary and abrupt, but you can guess as soon as you know them thoroughly.
A portrait of your favorite characters.
54. It is compatible things to hunt and love animals. What our morality imposes on us is not to use tricks or traps. My crew and I have left the field when the heat or weather conditions made hunting too easy and enervated it. Hunting is not killing, but taking down difficult pieces after tough competition. This explains that one returns more satisfied with two partridges shot against prognosis than a dozen eggs.
A very personal conception of hunting activity.
55. I have taken a deliberate position in my literature for the weak. In all my books there is a harassment of the individual by society and it always wins. And this in any of my protagonists, however different they may be, from the bourgeois Cecilio Rubes of "My idolized son Sisí", to the Nini of "Las ratas", who in order to survive have to hunt and eat these animals. In spite of the social or class distance that evidently exists between both characters, in the end we find ourselves with two beings frustrated and harassed by a relentless social environment.
On his ethical and literary predilections.
56. When life grabs you, there is every power of decision.
Goodbye control.
57. Every individual in the village would prefer to die rather than move a finger for the benefit of others. People lived isolated and only cared about themselves. And to tell the truth, the fierce individualism of the valley only broke on Sunday afternoons, when the sun went down.
Fragment of The Way.
58. (...) The priest said then that each one had a marked path in life and that one could renege on that path by ambition and sensuality and that a beggar could be richer than a millionaire in his palace, charged of marbles and servants.
A logic of religious morality.
Another excerpt from one of his best works: El camino.
59. It was all like a dream, painful and poignant in its very satiety.
One of the phrases of Miguel Delibes based on the emotional.
60. She seemed to walk under the weight of an invisible bundle that forced her to hunch around her waist. They were, without doubt, remorse.
A character description that starts from the physical to show the psychological.
61. Savings, when done at the expense of an unmet need, cause in men acrimony and rancor.
Saving is not the same as not being able to satisfy a priority need.
62. The huge mountains, with their sharp ridges cut out over the horizon, imbued an irritating impression of insignificance.
A powerful description of the natural environment.
63. Red hair could, in fact, be a reason for longevity or, at least, a kind of protective amulet.
Folklore is very present in the thought of Miguel Delibes.
64. The power of decision comes to man when he no longer needs anything
About old age
65. When people lack muscles in their arms, they have enough in their tongues.
A scathing comment about those who criticize a lot.
66. To live was to die day by day, little by little, inexorably.
Life seen as a countdown.
67. Men are made; the mountains are already made.
An aphorism about our link with nature.
68. The instruction, in the College; education, at home
A distinction between two types of knowledge transmission.
69. Things have to be that way because that's how they always have been, why not put yourself next to those who can correspond to you?
A reflection imbued with conservatism.
70. We live among civilized people and among civilized people we have to behave like a civilized being.
A small personal sacrifice to be able to live in society.
