Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”

“She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.”

“Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.”

“She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.”

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

“If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”

“He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.”

“Halfway through one August day, while she was embroidering with her friends, she heard someone coming to the door. She didn't have to look to see who it was. "He was fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to see things close by," she told me. "But it was him, God damn it, it was him!”

“Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”

“Papaz efendi o tarihlerde bunamaya başlamıştı. Bu bunaklığı giderek artacak ve yıllar sonra papaz, şeytanın Tanrıya başkaldırışının belki de zaferle sonuçlandığını ve gaflet içindekileri faka bastırmak için gerçek kimliğini gizleyerek, gökler katındaki taht'a şeytanın oturduğunu ileri sürecekti.”

“Sadeliğin üstünlüğünü, ayrıcalığını anlayabilmesi için otuz iki savaş çıkarması, ölümle bütün anlaşmalarını bozması, ün denilen pisliğe bir domuz gibi bulanması ve tam kırk yıl yitirmesi gerekmişti.”

“Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination.”

“They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.”

“She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.”

“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.”

“It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”

“My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.”

“Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”

“What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.”

“Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained.”

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

“1) I love you not for whom you are,but who i am when i'm by your side.2) No person deserves your tears,and who deserves them won't make you cry.3) Just because someone doesn't love you as you wish,it doesn't mean you're not loved with all his/her being.4) A true friend is the one,who hold your hand and touches your heart.5) The worst way to miss someone is,to be seated by him/her and know you'll never have him/her.6) Never stop smiling not even when you're sad,someone might fall in love with your smile.7) You may only be a person in this world,but for someone you're the world.8) Don't spend time with someone,who doesn't care spending it with you.9) Maybe God wants you to meet many wrong people,before you meet the right one,so when it happens you'll be thankful.10) Dont cry because it came to an end,smile because it happened.11) There will always be people who'll hurt you,so you need to continue trusting, just be careful.12) Become a better person and be sure to know who you are,before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.13) Don't struggle so much,best things happen when not expected.”

“As I hear him, I understand that he's not more moronic because of the brandy than he is because of his cowardice.”

“A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.”

“Shame has poor memory.”

“Things have a mind of its own; it’s simply the matter of waking up their souls.” – Melquiades”

“Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

“Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”

“[T]hink of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”

“«Parece maricas» (...) «E era uma pena, porque estava de se barrar com manteiga e comer-se vivo»”

“At first he told them that everything was just the same, that the pink snails were still in the house where he had been born, that the dry herring still had the same taste on a piece of toast, that the waterfalls in the village still took on a perfumed smell at dusk. They were the notebook pages again, woven with the purple scribbling, in which he dedicated a special paragraph to each one. Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught then about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. ”

“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".”

“He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.”

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”

“In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.”

“He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”

“Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.”

“For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”

“This soup tastes like windows”

“In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.”

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

“Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams...”

“Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.”

“Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them.”

“She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came.”

“The woman stayed on her stool, silent, concentrating, watching the man's movements with an air of declining sadness. Watching him as a lamp about to go out might have looked at a man.”

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”