El Cid Book Quotes

In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer. He would say that El Cid Ruy Díaz4 had

Like a rite of life I take a book in my hands. In it the earth burns, scorched, the syllables, the verses, the mythical horizon blinded by the sun. El Cid rides, lost in words, way of the poem and exile. The steppe is a bonfire of fire and loneliness. The hero and his hosts are already smoke.