Gabriel García Márquez

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

“four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.”

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”

“The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart.”

“Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.”

“But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass.”

“No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. “No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

“He always believed he loved his daughter, but the fear of rabies obliged the Marquis to admit to himself that this was a lie for the sake of convenience. Bernarda, on the other hand, did not even ask herself the question, for she knew very well she did not love the girl and the girl did not love her, and both things seemed fitting. A good part of the hatred each of them felt for Sierva Maria was caused by the other's qualities in her.”

“A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.”

“Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.”

“I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.”

“But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

“After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip.”

“The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. "And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart.”

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

“This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.”

“It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...”

“What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.”

“I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.”

“הדחף הראשון שלי היה לדפוק על הדלת כדי לברר את פרטי התגלית הזאת, אבל הביישנות גברה עלי. כך לימדו אותי החיים עצמם שאחד הסודות היעילים ביותר לכתיבה הוא ללמוד לקרוא את כתב החרטומים של המציאות בלי לדפוק על שום דלת כדי לברר משהו.”