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 direct newspapers with a national circulation, but as his career progressed he dedicated himself to his true vocation: novel writer.
- Related article: "89 great phrases about intelligence and knowledge"
Quotes by Miguel Delibes
He became one of the members of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and was the winner of different first-rate literary prizes.
In today's article We will go through the life and work of this great writer through the best phrases of Miguel Delibes.
1. Fame doesn't have a place to hold that is really positive.
Delibes was not convinced to be popular.
2. Hunter... I am a hunter who writes; that is to say, I came into contact with the fundamental elements of deep Castile through my hunting and fishing excursions. So I learned to speak like those Castilians. And all my books have these characters inside, from the pickpocket in Las ratas to Mr. Cayo in The Disputed Vote... We can say that I learned my communication with the people and my language of the people in contact with these gentlemen, going there for a different thing.
Extract where he shows his passion for hunting.
3. Modern man lives oblivious to those sensations inscribed deep in our biology and that sustain the pleasure of going out into the field.
His passion for the rural knew no bounds.
4. Progress is useless... if this "has to translate inexorably into an increase in lack of communication and violence, autocracy and distrust, the injustice and prostitution of the natural environment, the exploitation of man by man and the exaltation of money as the only worth".
A useful and calm progress, the ideal according to Delibes.
5. The people are the true owner of the language.
No academy should pass sentence.
6. Nothing in literature is more difficult than simplicity.
The more abstruse, the less you transmit.
7. Burials... Today I just want to deal with the funerals; from Federica-style burials, with baroque floats, plumed horses, and charioteers with wigs, which is how burials are done in my town. One, naturally, is not against burials. One is, rather, against fallacious formalisms. One advocates, in short, for simple, minority burials, where whoever goes, goes out of feeling and not out of education. Perhaps this would prevent so much talk of football at funerals and that, when it was time to leave, the deceased will be found alone because of the fact that the dead are the only punctual men in the world country.
His thoughts on the last goodbye to the elders.
8. I remember that day as lived inside another skin, unfolded.
About the Spanish Civil War.
9. The countryside is one of the few remaining opportunities to flee.
He always awaits us with open arms.
10. Journalism is an eraser of literature... And literature is journalism without the pressure of closure.
A great consideration about the trade.
11. Writing with precision does not only consist of finding the appropriate adjective in each case, 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 on time and seasoning them properly, where the secret of a good writer resides.
Great phrase by Miguel Delibes about the art of writing.
12. Fascism... More difficult than living under fascism was that each group believed they were in possession of the truth. That completely broke families. Some families broke up, others died in the Alcazar of Toledo; It was the saddest ending that one could imagine for that war, started as a joke in North Africa... I think that Spain was screwed up a long time before; I was not old enough to judge when Spain got screwed, but they did screw each other. There is no apology that it was the right or it was the left. Between the two they screwed up Spain.
Historical-political reflection.
13. Fidelity... I have been faithful to a newspaper, to a girlfriend, to some friends, to everything that I have felt good about. I have been faithful to my passion for journalism, hunting... I have done the same thing that I did as a child when I was older, with greater perfection, with greater sensitivity, with greater bad temper. I have always done the same.
On the concept of fidelity, which remains immutable in its being.
14. Glory is a matter of years, since it is time that decides which author is destined to be forgotten and which other is destined to last.
A sliver of luck may also be needed.
15. The language is born of the people; that it return to it, that it merge with it because the people are the true owners of the language.
A true expert in mastering 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 whom it depended. I was a child 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 means to the death of his loved ones.
17. The novel is an attempt to explore the human heart based on an idea that is almost always the same told in a different setting.
Reflections of Delibes on the narrative fact.
18. He had a sparkling imagination.
Red lady abstract on gray background.
19. The doctor's face was chalky, dislocated.
A description about a minor character.
20. Loss is one of the writer's motives.
Grief can help us write.
21. Literature... It has been a real dedication. I have 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 side of existence.
23. She forgot about the stagnant air in his brain.
Another small fragment of Lady in red on a gray background.
24. The most positive thing that has been shown with regimes of force, whether on the left or the right, is that they are not enough for man to live. Men need closer and more 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] be definitive, that it to the people, to merge with it, since, ultimately, 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 what it is if it did not rest on an unalterable moral background. Ethics and aesthetics have gone hand in hand in all aspects of my life.
On the ethics of his stories.
30. My peasants, my land... To the initial roots that tied me to my city, I had to add new ones from which I could never get rid of: my dear dead, my family, my friends, my North of Castilla, my School of Commerce, my everyday streets, my peasants, my land...
On his Castilian roots.
31. There have always been poor and rich, Mario, and the obligation of those of us who, thank God, have enough, is to help to those who do not have it, but you immediately to amend the plan, that you find defects 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 environmentalist who writes and hunts.
Great self definition.
33. To write a good book I do not consider it essential to know Paris or to have read Don 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 morbidity, for getting things out of hand. They asked me about the Civil War and then about my hobby of hunting partridges. And the headline was that Miguel Delibes regretted the spilled blood 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 for the soldiers who might 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 reaching people.
35. First I got to know my province, later I loved it and, finally, when I saw it harassed by pettiness and injustice, I tried to defend it. For eight decades I had to endure that Valladolid and Castilla 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 was imposed in the country, I transferred my concern for mine to the books. And not only to defend his economy, but to vindicate the peasant, our farmer, his pride, his dignity, the wise use of our language.
The origins of him shaped the literary spirit of him.
36. Feelings that nested fifteen decades ago in the hearts of my characters: solidarity, tenderness, mutual respect, love; the conviction that every being has come into this world to alleviate the loneliness of another being.
The moral and vital principles of Delibes's characters.
37. If the sky of Castile is so high, it is because the peasants raised it from looking at it so much.
Funny reflection on his homeland.
38. We tend to reduce language, to simplify it. It's hard for us to put together a sentence. In this way, those who talk a lot stumble a lot, and those who measure their words move 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 overlapped. Valladolid and Castilla would be the background and motive of my books in the future..., from them I have taken not only the characters, settings and arguments of my novels, but also the words with which they have been written... Those voices that lulled my childhood were the germ of my future expression.
Another reflection by Miguel Delibes about his peasant origin.
40. finished life... The hunter who writes ends at the same time as the writer who hunts... I ended up as I had always imagined: incapable of shooting down a red partridge or writing a page professionally.
A poetic phrase where he describes his decline.
41. Sex should be mystery and personal discovery.
Feud of oneself and no one else.
42. There are things that the human will is not able to control.
We are sometimes slaves to our emotions.
43. And they put in the memories of him some notes of throbbing reality.
Extract from El camino, one of his works.
44. He warned that children are inevitably to blame for those things for which no one is to blame.
From the same work as the previous extract.
45. Madrid scares me, because if Valladolid already seems to me 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 so much me as the characters that I represented in this literary carnival. They are, therefore, to a large extent my biography.
In each character there is a bit of his personality.
47. The question to ask is not whether hunting is cruel or not, but which hunting procedures are admissible and which are not.
Ethical reflection on the practice of hunting.
48. In life you have been achieving 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 like a failure in essential matters.
49. Perhaps it was her ability to surprise that dazzled me about her, that throughout the years kept me stubbornly in love with her.
About one of his loves.
50. He thought that history might repeat itself, and he fell asleep lulled to sleep by the sensation of a strange and placid bliss enveloping him.
Another fragment of his novel El camino.
51. It hurt him that events so easily became memories; noticing the bitter sensation that nothing, nothing of the past, could repeat itself.
52. The artist does not know who pushes him, what is his reference, why he writes or why he paints, for what reason he would stop doing it. In my case it was quite clear. I wrote for her. And when his judgment failed, I lacked the reference. I stopped doing it, I stopped writing, and this situation lasted for years. At that time I sometimes thought that everything was over.
Words of frustration when his wife died.
53. I doubt very much that there is only one hero in my books; they are all anti-heroes, but, at the same time, they are all wrapped in a warm look 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 that is guessed as soon as you get to know them thoroughly.
A portrait of his favorite characters.
54. Hunting and loving animals are compatible things. What our morality imposes on us is not to use tricks or traps. My gang and I have left the field when the heat or weather conditions made the hunt too easy and unnerved. Hunting is not killing, but taking down difficult game after tough competition. This explains why one returns more satisfied with two partridges killed against the odds than a dozen on the egg.
A very personal conception of the activity of hunting.
55. I have taken a deliberate stance for the weak in my literature. In all my books there is harassment of the individual by society and it always wins. And this in any of my protagonists, however disparate they may be, from the bourgeois Cecilio Rubes in "My idolized son Sisí", to Nini from "Las ratas", who in order to survive has to hunt and eat these animals. Despite the social or class distance that obviously exists between the two characters, ultimately we find ourselves with two frustrated beings harassed by an implacable social environment.
On his ethical and literary predilections.
56. When life grabs you, all power of decision is superfluous.
Goodbye control.
57. Every individual in the village would rather die than lift a finger for the benefit of others. People lived in isolation and only cared about themselves. And to tell the truth, the fierce individualism of the valley was only broken on Sunday afternoons, when the sun went down.
Fragment of The Way.
58. (...) The priest, he then said that each one had a marked path in life and that one could renounce that path for ambition and sensuality and that a beggar could be richer than a millionaire in his palace, laden with marbles and servants.
A logic of religious morality.
Another excerpt from one of his best works: The Way.
59. It was all like a dream, aching and stinging in the very satiety of him.
One of Miguel Delibes's phrases based on the emotional.
60. She seemed to walk under the weight of an invisible burden that forced her to bend over her waist. They were, without a doubt, remorse.
A character description that starts from the physical to show the psychological.
61. Saving, when done at the cost of an unsatisfied need, causes acrimony and anger in men.
Saving is not the same as not being able to satisfy a priority need.
62. The massive mountains, with their stout ridges jagged against the horizon, gave an irritating impression of insignificance.
A powerful description of the natural environment.
63. Red hair could indeed 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 it at all
About old age.
65. When people lack muscles in their arms, they have plenty 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 bond 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 they have always been that way. Why not put yourself next to those who can correspond to you?
A reflection impregnated with conservatism.
70. We live among civilized people and among civilized people you have to behave like a civilized being.
A small personal sacrifice to be able to live in society.
