In today’s article We will explore the life and work of this great writer through the best phrases of Miguel Delibes
1. Fame has no place to hold onto that is truly positive.
Delibes was not convinced about being 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 excursions as a hunter and fisherman. Then I learned to speak like those Castilians. And all my books have those characters in them, from the thief in The Rats 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 when I went there. to 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 countryside.
His passion for rural life knew no limits.
4. Progress is of no use… if it “must inexorably translate into an increase in lack of communication and violence, in autocracy and mistrust, in injustice and prostitution of the natural environment, in the exploitation of man by the man and the exaltation of money as the only value.
Useful and calm progress, the ideal according to Delibes.
5. The people are the true owners of the language.
No academy should pass sentence.
6. In literature there is nothing more difficult than simplicity.
7. Burials… Today I only want to deal with burials; of burials a la Federica, with baroque floats, plumed horses and charioteers with wigs, which is how funerals are done in my town. One, of course, is not against burials. One is, rather, against fallacious formalisms. One advocates, in short, simple, minority burials, where whoever goes, goes out of feeling and not out of education. Perhaps this would prevent so much football from being talked about at funerals and, when it was time to leave, the deceased would find himself alone because the dead are the only punctual men in 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 countryside is one of the few remaining opportunities to escape.
He always waits for us with open arms.
10. Journalism is a draft of literature…And literature is journalism without the pressure of closure.
A great consideration about the job.
11. Writing accurately does not only consist of finding the appropriate adjective in each case, but also the noun, verb or adverb, that is, the word. And it is in the management of those words, in finding them in time and seasoning them properly, where the secret of a good writer lies.
Great phrase by Miguel Delibes about the art of writing.
12. Fascism… More difficult than living under fascism was that each group believed it was in possession of the truth. That broke families completely. Some families broke up, others died in the Alcázar of Toledo; It was the saddest ending one could imagine for that war, started as a joke in North Africa… I think Spain got screwed a long time before; I wasn’t old enough to judge when Spain was screwed, but they were screwed between each other. There is no excuse that it was the right or it was the left. Between the two of them they fucked up Spain.
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 journalistic passion, to hunting… I have done the same things I did as a child when I grew up, with greater perfection, with greater sensitivity, with greater anger. I’ve always done the same.
About 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 other is destined to endure.
A bit of luck may also be necessary.
15. The language is born from the people; that it returns to it, that it merges with it because the people are the true owners of the language.
A true expert in the command 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 he depended on. I was a child of four or six years old but I was afraid that I would lack those who provided me with things to live on, my parents.
About the means to the death of your loved ones.
17. The novel is an attempt to explore the human heart based on an idea that is almost always the same told with a different environment.
Delibes’ reflections on the narrative event.
18. He had a sparkling imagination.
Abstract Lady in red on gray background.
19. The doctor’s face was chalky, disjointed.
A description about a secondary 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 it the refuge that I did not find so perfect in the cinema or in the cafe or in the game; the relationship between two was perfectly established between a person and a book. My desire when writing was to try to communicate between 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 tyrant known.
The gray facet of existence.
23. He 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 demonstrated with regimes of force, whether left or 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 their literary work.
27. My greatest wish would be that this Grammar (from the Royal Academy, 2010) was definitive, that it reached the people, that it merged with them, 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 were not based on an unalterable moral foundation. Ethics and aesthetics have gone hand in hand in all aspects of my life.
About 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 that I could never let go of: my beloved dead, my family, my friends, my North of Castile, my Business School, my everyday streets, my farmers, my land….
About his Castilian roots.
31. There have always been poor and rich, Mario, and the obligation of those who, thank God, have enough, is to help those who do not have it, but you must immediately amend the plan, which finds 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, he had not yet read it.
Ironic reflection on experience and talent.
34. Journalism… Defects of the contemporary journalist? The desire for morbidity, for making things crazy. They asked me about the Civil War and then about my hobby of hunting partridges. And the headline was that Miguel Delibes regretted the blood shed as if I had gone around shooting shots in the back of the head. It was not known if he was sorry for the partridges he had killed or for the soldiers who 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 reaching people.
35. First I knew my province, later I loved it and, finally, when I saw it harassed by meanness and injustice I tried to defend it. For eight decades I had to endure Valladolid and Castilla being 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 to the books my concern for what is mine. And not only to defend its economy but to vindicate 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 hearts 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 Delibes’ 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, 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 true fact: when I made the decision to write, literature and the feeling of my land became intertwined. Valladolid and Castilla would be the background and the motive of my books in the future…, from them I have taken not only the characters, settings and plots of my novels, but also the words with which they have been written… Those voices that They lulled my childhood and were the germ of my future expression.
Another reflection by Miguel Delibes about his peasant origins.
40. Life over… 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 with professionalism.
A poetic phrase where he describes his decline.
41. Sex should be mystery and personal discovery.
Fiefdom of oneself and no one else.
42. There are things that the human will is not capable of controlling.
We are, sometimes, slaves to our emotions.
43. And they put in their memories some notes of palpitating reality.
Extract from The Road, 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 like a huge parking lot to me, Madrid seems like five times that parking lot to me.
Sarcastic thought about the Spanish capital.
46. ​​I have not been so much myself as the characters I represented in this literary carnival. They are, therefore, to a large extent my biography.
In each character there is a little piece of their personality.
47. What must be asked is not whether hunting is cruel or not, but what hunting procedures are admissible and what others are not.
Ethical reflection on the practice of hunting.
48. In life you have achieved many things, but you have failed in what is 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 over the years kept me tenaciously in love with her.
About one of his loves.
50. He thought that history could repeat itself, and he slept lulled by the sensation that the effluvia of a placid and strange bliss was surrounding him.
Another fragment of his novel El Camino.
51. It hurt him that events so easily became memories; 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, for what reason he would stop doing so. In my case it was quite clear. I wrote for her. And when her judgment was lacking, 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 very much doubt that there is a single 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 provide 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 can be guessed as soon as you know them in depth.
A portrait of your favorite characters.
54. Hunting and loving animals are compatible things. What our morality imposes on us is not to use tricks or traps. My group and I have abandoned the field when the heat or weather made hunting too easy and unnerving. Hunting is not about killing, but about taking down difficult game after tough competition. This explains why one returns more satisfied with two partridges shot against the odds than a dozen eggs.
A very personal conception of the hunting activity.
55. In my literature I have taken a deliberate stance for the weak. In all my books there is harassment of the individual by society and society always wins. And this in any of my protagonists, no matter how disparate they may be, from the bourgeois Cecilio Rubes in “My idolized son SisÔ, to Nini in “The rats”, who to survive has to hunt and eat these animals. Despite the social or class distance that evidently exists between both characters, ultimately we find two beings frustrated and harassed by an implacable social environment.
About his ethical and literary predilections.
56. When life takes hold of one, all power of decision is superfluous.
Goodbye control.
57. Every individual in the town would rather die than lift 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 was only broken on Sunday afternoons, when the sun went down.
Fragment of The Way.
58. (…) The priest then said that everyone had a marked path in life and that one could renounce that path out of ambition and sensuality and that a beggar could be richer than a millionaire in his palace, loaded of marbles and servants.
A logic of religious morality.
Another excerpt from one of his best works: The Road.
59. It was all like a dream, painful and stinging in its very satiety.
One of Miguel Delibes’ phrases based on emotion.
60. She appeared to walk under the weight of an invisible burden that forced her to bend at the waist. They were, without a doubt, regrets.
A character description that starts from the physical to show the psychological.
61. Savings, when done at the cost of an unsatisfied need, cause acrimony and resentment in men.
Saving is not the same as not being able to satisfy a priority need.
62. The enormous mountains, with their strong crests silhouetted against the horizon, gave 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 it for anything
About old age.
65. When people lack muscles in their arms, they have extra muscles in their tongue.
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. Instruction, in the School; education, at home.
A distinction between two types of knowledge transmission.
69. Things have to be this 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 we must behave like a civilized being.
A small personal sacrifice to be able to live in society.
