Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Dacă detest ceva pe lumea asta sunt sărbătorile obligatorii în care lumea plânge fiindcă e fericită, focurile de artificii, colindele aiurite, ghirlandele de hârtie creponată fără nici o legătură cu un Prunc care s a născut acum două mii de ani într un staul sărman.”

“La începutul lui iulie, am simţit apropierea reală a morţii. Inima mea şi-a pierdut ritmul şi am început să văd şi să simt pretutindeni semnele fără greş ale sfârşitului. Atunci am început să măsor viaţa nu în ani, ci în decenii. Cel al anilor cincizeci fusese hotărâtor, pentru că am devenit conştient că aproape toată lumea era mai tânără decât mine. Cel al anilor şaizeci a fost cel mai intens, din cauza bănuielii că nu-mi mai rămânea timp să greşesc. Cel al anilor şaptezeci mi-a inspirat teama, căci exista oricum posibilitatea să fie ultimul. Totuşi, când m-am trezit viu în dimineaţa celor nouăzeci de ani, în patul fericit al Delgadinei, mi s-a năzărit plăcuta idee că viaţa nu era ceva care curge precum râul învolburat al lui Heraclit, ci o ocazie unică de a te întoarce pe grătar, perpelindu-te şi pe partea cealaltă încă nouăzeci de ani.”

“M-am apucat să citesc Micul Prinţ de Saint Exupéry, un autor francez pe care o lume întreagă îl admiră mai mult decât francezii. A fost prima poveste pe care a ascultat-o cu atâta atenţie, fără să se trezească, încât a fost nevoie să-i citesc fără răgaz două zile, până i-am terminat-o. Am continuat cu Poveştile lui Perrault, cu Biblia, cu O mie şi una de nopţi într-o versiune aseptică pentru copii şi, din pricina diferenţelor din somnul ei, mi-am dat seama că avea mai multe grade de profunzime care depindeau de cât de interesante i se păreau cele citite. Când simţeam că nu mai puteam, stingeam lumina şi mă culcam, ţinând o în braţe până cântau cocoşii. Eram atât de fericit, încât o sărutam pe pleoape, uşurel, şi într-o noapte s-a pogorât parcă o lumină din cer: a zâmbit pentru prima oară. Mai târziu, fără niciun motiv, s-a răsucit în pat, mi-a întors spatele şi a spus supărată: Isabel a făcut melcii să plângă. Exaltat de iluzia unui dialog, am întrebat-o pe acelaşi ton: Ai cui erau? N-a răspuns. Vocea ei avea o nuanţă plebee, ca şi când n-ar fi fost a ei, ci a cuiva străin aflat înlăuntrul său. Orice urmă de îndoială a dispărut atunci din cugetul meu: o preferam adormită.”

“Sexul e consolarea care-ţi mai rămâne când nu-ţi ajunge dragostea.”

“Aren't you afraid you will be damned?''I believe I already am, but not by the Holy Spirit,' said Delaura without alarm. 'I have always believed He attributes more importance to love than to faith.”

“He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.”

“N-am să uit vreodată privirea ei întunecată pe când mâncam: De ce m-ai cunoscut atât de bătrân? I-am răspuns adevărul: Vârsta nu e cea pe care o ai, ci aceea pe care o simţi.”

“Am ajuns să fiu conştient că forţa invincibilă care a împins lumea înainte nu e iubirea fericită, ci aceea neîmplinită.”

“Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”

“Remember that everything that is good, whatever it's origin, comes from the holy spirit.”

“Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.”

“Gabito isn't deceiving anyone," she said with an innocent smile, "but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.”

“On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.”

“Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”

“Nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing.”

“For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank.”

“That was the state of the world when I began to be aware of my family environment, and I cannot evoke it in any other way: sorrows, griefs, uncertainties in the solitude of an immense house.”

“The audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her: "I give you my life in this rose.”

“Science has eliminated distance,” Melquíades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.”

“It took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad.”

“My heart in an uproar.”

“Dawns in the dormitory had a suspicious resemblance to happiness.”

“And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”

“Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.”

“Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.”

“I soaked the conversations up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.”

“She was the only person in the house, of either sex, who did not seem to have a heart pierced by the sorrow of thwarted love.”

“They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different”

“The colonel, pursued by sinister remorse for having killed a man in an affair of honor, brought everything necessary for recreating the past as far away as possible from his bad memories”

“The move to Arcata was seen by my grandparents as a journey into forgetting.”

“The only certainty was that they took everything with them: money, December breezes, the bread knife, thunder at 3 in the afternoon, the scent of jasmines, love. All that remained were the dusty almond trees, the reverberating streets, the houses of wood and roofs of rusting tin with their taciturn inhabitants, devastated by memories.”

“Escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide”

“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. no one was safe from its onslaught.”

“I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence”

“it was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when one could do nothing, but contemplate the rain”

“I go to seek a great perhaps”

“El coronel Aureliano Buendía entendió, que la vejez, no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”

“He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.”

“Intrigado con ese enigma, escarbó tan profundamente en los sentimientos de ella, que buscando el interés encontró el amor, porque buscando que ella lo quisiera terminó por quererla.”

“No: that fear had been inside him for manyyears, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over hisown shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream,and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as hehad always believed, but an immediate reality.”

“There is great power in the irresistible force of love.”

“Non aprire quell'uscio' disse. 'Il corridoio è pieno di sogni difficili.”

“Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they hadlearned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonialcatastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learnedanything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can nolonger do any good.”

“I have no friends," he said. "And if I do have any left it won't be for long.”

“«... y sentí que me hundía en las delicias de las arenas movedizas de su ternura.»”

“When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead."Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy.”

“From that time on the parish priest began to show signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary.”

“Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath, and when there was no more hay or corn or roots, she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets, the Persian rugs, the plush bedspreads, the velvet drapes, and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed.”

“Let's forget about each other forever," she told him. "we're too old for this sort of thing now.”

“...the only souvenir she kept of Aureliano Segundo was a pair of patent leather boots, which, according to what he himself had said, were the ones he wanted to wear in his coffin. She kept them wrapped in cloth in the bottom of a trunk and made ready to feed on memories, waiting without despair. "He has to come sooner or later," she told herself, "even if it's just to put on those boots.”