Цитаты из книг — Хавьер Серкас

Обнаруживаешь, что, по сути, все города похожи друг на друга. Наверное, за единственным исключением: это Нью-Йорк, потому что Нью-Йорк не хочет быть ни на кого похожим, напротив, все остальные города хотят походить на Нью-Йорк.

Later, in the final months of his illness, when he’d wasted away and could barely move or speak, I went on telling him about this book. I talked to him about the years of the political change, about what happened on 23 February, about events and figures we’d argued over years before till we were fed up; now he listened to…

... the coup d’état failed completely and it was its complete failure that turned the democratic system in the form of a parliamentary monarchy into the only viable system of government in Spain, and for that reason it’s also possible to say, as if I’d wanted to insinuate that violence is history’s essence, the material…

Невыносима сама мысль о том, что наша судьба не уникальна, что все происходящее в нашей жизни происходило также и с другими людьми и что мы лишь снова и снова участвуем в одних и тех же порядком потускневших приключениях.

Я робко высказался, что верность — это одно из качеств, более всего отличающих мужчин от женщин, ибо нам стоит значительно большего труда соблюдать ее. Но, едва сформулировав фразу, я сразу же в ней раскаялся, она показалась мне совершенно дурацкой. — Ерунда, — прозорливо отреагировала Клаудия. — Это одно из немногих…

...after all very few knew as well as he did that it was perhaps impossible to bring ethics into politics without renouncing politics, because very few knew as well as he did that perhaps nobody comes to power without using dubious or dangerous or simply evil means, playing fair or trying as hard as he could to play fair…

That’s more or less what Spain in the 1970s was like: a country full of vulgar, uncultivated, swindling, womanizing, gambling men without many scruples, provincials with the morality of survivors brought up between Acción Católica and the Falange who had lived comfortably under Francoism, collaborators who wouldn’t even…

As for the King, from the beginning he felt enormous sympathy for Suárez, but never deceived himself about him: ‘Adolfo is neither for Opus Dei nor for the Falange,’ he said on some occasion. ‘Adolfo is for Adolfo.’

Maybe because it’s not death but the uncertainty of death that we find intolerable, this last thought calmed him...

During the transition few people in Spain forgot, and the memory of the war was more present than ever in the memory of the political class and the population in general; that is precisely one of the reasons why no one or hardly anyone opposed the 23 February coup: during those years everyone wanted to avoid at any price…

Politics is a slaughterhouse: many sighs of relief were heard, but not a single lament for his withdrawal.

...the day after he took office he read a televised message in which, with a political language, tone and form incompatible with the tattered starch of Francoism, promised concord and reconciliation by way of a democracy in which governments would be ‘the result of the will of the majority of the Spanish people’, and the…

I have to ask you a favour, Adolfo, he told him point-blank. I want you to be Prime Minister of the government. He didn’t yell in jubilation; all he managed to articulate was: Shit, Your Majesty, I thought you’d never ask.

...the person who in certain respects best portrayed Suárez at this time was Francisco Franco, who was the person who knew better than anyone the logic of Francoist power because he was the one who’d created it. The two men hardly ever coincided in their lives outside of ceremonial occasions, on one of which, however, the…

It’s very likely that Adolfo Suárez was a decent man, but not an ethically irreproachable man, or even an exceptional man, or at least not the kind of man usually thought of as exceptional; he was however, all things considered, the most forceful and decisive Spanish politician of the last century.

...in September 1976, during a very heated argument in Suárez’s office, having just accepted or demanded his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister, he was told by General de Santiago: ‘Let me remind you, Prime Minister, that this country has seen more than one coup d’état.’ ‘And let me remind you, General,’ answered…

There is no protagonist, witness or investigator of the coup who doesn’t have answers to these questions, but there are barely two identical answers. In spite of being contradictory, many of them are valid; or might be: segmenting history is an arbitrary exercise; strictly speaking, it’s impossible to pin down the exact…