Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.”

“The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”

“Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”

“The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”

“Albay Márquez, "Yüreğini kolla, Aureliano," dedi, "ölmeden çürüyorsun.”

“Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.”

“One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever".”

“Everyone will have gone then except us, because we're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs' horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they'll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn't passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories.”

“Y se fueron a morir de hambre y de amor al dormitorio.”

“The hunt for love is haughty falconry.”

“Úrsula se perguntava se não era preferível se deitar logo de uma vez na sepultura e lhe jogarem a terra por cima, e perguntava a Deus, sem medo, se realmente acreditava que as pessoas eram feitas de ferro para suportar tantas penas e mortificações. E perguntando e perguntando ia atiçando sua própria perturbação e sentia desejos irreprimíveis de se soltar e não ter papas na língua como um forasteiro e de se permitir afinal um instante de rebeldia, o instante tantas vezes desejado e tantas vezes adiado, para cortar a resignação pela raiz e cagar de uma vez para tudo e tirar do coração os infinitos montes de palavrões que tivera que engolir durante um século inteiro de conformismo.– Porra! – gritou.Amaranta, que começava a colocar a roupa no baú, pensou que ela tinha sido picada por um escorpião.– Onde está? – perguntou alarmada.– O quê?– O animal! – esclareceu Amaranta.Úrsula pôs o dedo no coração.– Aqui – disse”

“..the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and [that] thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past”

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

“She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.”

“my heart has more rooms in it than a whore house”

“El sexo es el consuelo que uno tiene cuando no le alcanza el amor”

“Lo tocó murmurando la letra, con el violín bañado en lágrimas, y con una inspiración tan intensa que a los primeros compases empezaron a ladrar los perros de la calle, y luego los de la ciudad, pero después se fueron callando poco a poco por el hechizo de la música, y el valse terminó con un silencio sobrenatural. El balcón no se abrió, ni nadie se asomó a la calle, ni siquiera el sereno que casi siempre acudía con su candil tratando de medrar con las migajas de las serenatas. El acto fue un conjuro de alivio para Florentino Ariza, pues cuando guardó el violin en el estuche y se alejó por las calles muertas sin mirar hacia atrás, no sentía ya que iba la mañana siguinte, sino que se había ido desde hacía muchos años con la disposición irrevocable de no volver jamás.”

“Comer sin medida fue siempre su único modo de llorar, y nunca la había visto hacerlo con tanta pesadumbre”

“One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.”

“Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists".”

“Cease, cows, life is short.”

“Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.”

“Era inevitable: el olor de las almendras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados.”

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

“Los hombres no nacen el día en que la madre los trae al mundo, sino cuando la vida los obliga a traerse a sí mismos”

“Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”

“Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.”

“As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”

“Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.”

“Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supereme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities.”

“He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”

“Un jour que le père Nicanor s'en vint le voir sous son châtaignier avec un damier et une boîte de jetons pour le convier à jouer aux dames avec lui, José Arcadio Buendia ne voulut point accepter car, lui dit-il, jamais il n'avait pu comprendre quel sens pouvait revêtir un combat entre deux adversaires d'accord sur les mêmes principes.”

“Un buen escritor se aprecia mejor por lo que rompe que por lo que publica.”

“After searching for it uselessly in the taste of the earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms.”

“a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.”

“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”

“Lo unico que me duele de morir es que no es de amor”

“con ella aprendió [...] lo que ya había padecido muchas veces anteriores sin saberlo: se puede estar enamorado de varias personas a la vez, y de todas con el mismo dolor, sin traicionar a ninguna”

“Desde la primera noche de luna, ambos se hicieron trizas los corazones con un amor de principiantes feroces”

“the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end”

“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”

“I would prove to the men how mistaken they are in thinking that they no longerfall in love when they grow old--not knowing that they grow old when they stopfalling in love.”

“The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.”

“...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”

“Aureliano Secondo tornò nella casa coi suoi bauli, convinto che non soltanto Ursula, ma anche tutti gli abitanti di Macondo stavano aspettando che spiovesse per morire. Li aveva visti, passando, seduti nei salotti con lo sguardo assorto e le braccia incrociate, intenti a sentir trascorrere un tempo intero, un tempo non domato, perchè era inutile dividerlo in mesi e in anni, e i giorni in ore, se non si poteva far altro che contemplare la pioggia”

“Only God knows how much I love you.”

“He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.”

“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.”

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”