Javier Cercas Quotes

I was about to tell her that Miralles hadn't fought in one war, but many, but I couldn't, because I suddenly saw Miralles walking
across the Libyan desert towards the Murzuk oasis- young, ragged, dusty and annonymous, carrying the tricolour flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and also the country of liberty and which only exists because he and four Moors and a black guy are raising that flag as they keep walking onwards, onwards, ever onwards.

Fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction.

If there's one thing I hate the Communists for, Your Excellency,' Foxa once said to Franco, 'it's for obliging me to join the Falange.

Of course, if you ask, nobody was there when they torched the churches.

I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and
punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium.

Marco lives in a fantasy world, one that's more interesting and more fun than reality. That's the definition of being insane, surely?" said my son, Raul

"I suppose so," I said. "It's like Don Quixote.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.

Memory is threatening to replace history in an era saturated with memory. This is bad news. Memory and history are notionally opposites: memory is individual, partial and subjective; history is collective and aspires to be comprehensive and objective. Memory and history are also complementary: history gives sense to memory; memory is a tool, an ingredient, a part of history. But memory is not history.

He (Antonio Machado) was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.

Nobody remembers them, you know ? Nobody. Nobody remebers why they died, why they didnt have a wife and children
and a sun lit room either, nobody, least of all people for whom they fought. There is no and there never will be some pathetic street
in one pathetic village of a shitty country that is named after any of them.
Miralles stopped talking, he took out his handkerchief, wiped the tears, blew his nose, he did so without shame, as if he was not ashamed of crying in public,
as Homers warriors of old did it, as any soldier of Salamis would do.

All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts.