Javier Cercas Quotes & Sayings

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. — Javier Cercas

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction. — Javier Cercas

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. — Javier Cercas

It is, but a virtue taken to extremes is a vice. If one does not understand there are things more important than the truth one doesn't understand how important the truth is. — Javier Cercas

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. — Javier Cercas

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. — Javier Cercas

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

Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:
'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium. — Javier Cercas

Fiction always surpasses reality but reality is always richer than fiction. — Javier Cercas

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

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. — Javier Cercas