Was the March 12th 2010, in Valladolid. One of the great writers of Spanish literature, Don Miguel Delibes placeholder image. I have close references from Delibes because my grandfather and my aunts knew him at the beginning of the 60's when they lived in Sedano (Burgos). Today, in his memory, I rescue some of his phrases and fragments of some of those works that earned him the consideration and prestige both for the content and for the form of its unique narrative.

Notes on Delibes

With his first novel, The shade of the cypress is elongated, he won Nadal prize in 1947, a fact that boosted his literary career. It was the first of many he received over the years. Then published Even it is day, The road, My idolized son Sisi, The red leaf y The rats, among other works. In 1966 he published Five hours with Mario and in 1975 The wars of our ancestors, that were adapted to the theater. I was lucky to see the latter in 1989 in the version they brought to the stage José Sacristán and Juan José Otegui. I still retain it in my memory as one of the best theatrical performances I have ever seen.

And if we have to talk about adaptations, possibly the most remembered and famous is the film version that Mario camus directed in 1981 from The holy innocents. Later Delibes published Lady in red on gray background y Hunting. But they are also The disputed vote of Senor Cayo, Diary of a retiree o The heretic. All that as a novelist, but we cannot forget his travel and hunting books, his stories, his essays and his articles.

Delibes phrases

• My life as a writer would not be what it is if it were not supported by an unalterable moral background. Ethics and aesthetics have gone hand in hand in all aspects of my life.

• To write a good book, I do not consider it essential to know Paris or to have read Don Quixote. When Cervantes wrote it, he had not yet read it.

• If the sky of Castile is high, it is because the peasants will have raised it from looking at it so much.

• A people without literature is a mute people.

• Let time come looking for us instead of fighting it.

Lady in red on gray background 

• The state of happiness does not exist in man. There are glimpses, moments, approaches, but happiness ends the moment it begins to manifest itself. It never becomes an ongoing situation. When you have nothing, you need; when you have something, you fear. It is always so. Total, that you never get.
• He had a frothy imagination.
• He forgot about the stagnant air in his brain.
• I remember that day as lived inside another skin, unfolded. 

The road

• Life was the worst tyrant known.
• Something faded in him: perhaps faith in the perenniality of childhood.
• No one is able to pinpoint the place in the brain where good ideas are generated.
• There are things that the human will is unable to control. 

One year of my life

• I give the characters a preponderant place among all the elements that are combined in a novel. Some characters who really live relegate, until their importance is diluted, the romantic architecture, they make the style an exhibition vehicle whose existence is barely perceived and are enough to make the most absurd of the arguments plausible. 

Five hours with Mario

• Charity should only fill the cracks of justice but not the depths of injustice.
• Doesn't it seem significant, for example, that the concept of fairness always suspiciously coincided with our interests?
• If you don't say the words to someone they are nothing. The good guys on the right and the bad guys on the left! They taught you that, right? But you prefer to just accept it, rather than take the trouble to look inside. We are all good and bad ... Both at the same time. What must be banished is hypocrisy, you understand?
• Virgin you! But do you think I'm sucking my thumb, Mario, darling? And it is not that I am going to say that you are vicious, that neither, but, come on, some relief from time to time ... Then the Madrid, the honeymoon, that you gave me a humiliation that you do not see, a I despise like that, I start by admitting that I was scared, that I knew something strange had to happen, because of the children, let's see, but I thought it was only once, word of honor, and I was resigned, I swear, whatever it is, but you went to bed and "good night", as if you had gone to bed with a policeman ...
• There were always poor and rich, Mario, and the obligation of those who, thank God, we have enough, is to help those who do not have it, but you immediately to mend the flat, that you find defects even in the Gospel.

The red leaf

• Eloy, it is not the same to tell a woman "my life" than "my life."
• Life was a waiting room and we all go around waiting, trying to distract ourselves, and we do not attend every time they say: "Next!", Because it scares us to think that one day the next it will be us.

The rats

• Sooner or later, the violence turns against you.

The Holy Innocents

• And what about your brother-in-law, Paco, that retarded man from the farm? You told me once that with the pigeon I could play, and Paco, the Short, tilted his head,
  Azarías is innocent, but try, look, by proving nothing is lost,
  He turned his eyes to the row of mill houses, all twins, with the arbor over each of the doors, and shouted,
  Azarías!
  and, after a while, Azarías appeared, the trousers by the hamstrings, the drooling smile, chewing on nothing, ...

The wars of our ancestors

• Pacifico began by believing in non-violence and ended up convinced that eliminating a fellow man with the knife to open pinions was a normal act.