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Quote by David B. Gil

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El guerrero a la sombra del cerezo

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David B. Gil

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“Elegir una edad concreta para pintarla significaba perder retales de su presencia, y eso convertiría su recuerdo en algo efímero.”

RecuerdoLeonardo Da VinciEdadPresenciaEfímeroLágrimas Mona LisaRetales
Book:Las lágrimas de Mona Lisa: Una novela histórica ambientada en el Renacimiento italiano, que aborda la violencia doméstica.
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“Vitruvius discovered that the length of a man’s ear is one-third of the length of his face, and the length of a man’s foot is one-sixth of his height. As a child, I was asked to measure the distance from the tip of my head to the floor and divide it by the distance from my belly button to the ground. The number I came up with is the same number that nearly everyone will. A ratio of 1.618.”

ScienceVitruvius
Book:Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution
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“These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow-- a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires-- but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it. And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not.”

MemoriesMemoryLost Youth
Book:All quiet on the western front
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“For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards - they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

World War ISoldiersDisillusionmentLost Youth
Book:All quiet on the western front
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“By 1948 I was safe on my feet and able to get about quite normally, but I was thirty-four and life was slipping past me. I could not face burial alive in Coombargana at that age after all that I had been and done during the war, and I began to feel I should go crazy if I didn’t get away from it to England again, where things were happening. I think my parents understood, because they made no objection when I suggested that I should go back to Oxford for a year and finish taking my degree. That was five years ago. What I didn’t realise then was that it wasn’t England I was really fretting for. It was my lost youth.”

Lost Youth
Book:Requiem for a Wren
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