Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“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 it itself. ”

“A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart”

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

“I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.”

“Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.”

“because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”

“nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

“It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trails, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. ”

“So for now wave good-bye leave your hands held high”

“Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...”

“She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.”

“Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.”

“Às vezes lhe doía ter deixado com a sua passagem aquele riacho de miséria e às vezes sentia tanta raiva que espetava os dedos nas agulhas,porém mais lhe doía e com mais raiva ficava e mais lhe amargava o fragrante e bichado goiabal de amor que ia arrastando até a morte.”

“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”

“The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”

“They kept a clean and neat house. Rebeca would open it wide at dawn and the wind from the graveyard would come in through the windows and go out through the doors to the yard and leave the whitewashed walls and furniture tanned by the saltpeter of the dead.”

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”

“Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.”

“He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”

“Ambos siguieron atentos a los rumores crecientes sobre la gravedad de la peste, y aun contra sus deseos tuvieron que conversar otra vez sobre asuntos que les eran comunes, como en los tiempos en que se odiaban menos. Para él era claro. Siempre creyó que amaba a la hija, pero el miedo al mal de rabia lo obligaba a confesarse que se engañaba a sí mismo por comodidad. Bernarda, en cambio, no se lo preguntó siquiera, pues tenía plena conciencia de no amarla ni de ser amada por ella, y ambas cosas le parecían justas. Mucho del odio que ambos sentían por la niña era por lo que ella tenía del uno y del otro. Sin embargo, Bernarda estaba dispuesta a hacer la farsa de las lágrimas y a guardar un luto de madre.”

“Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.”

“Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such a clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.”

“Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

“She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.”

“In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.”

“his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.”

“The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.”

“Si vas a volverte loco, vuelve te solo”

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”

“It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.”

“an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.”

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”

“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

“Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”

“Pierwszy z rodu jest przywiazany do drzewa, a ostatniego zjadaja mrowki.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.”

“Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:"Only God knows how much I loved you.”

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”

“Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.”

“If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.”

“El amor es un sentimiento contranatural que une a dos desconocidos en una relación mezquina e insalubre, cuanto más intensa, tanto más efímera”

“I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.”

“Hildebranda had a universal conception of love, and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world.”

“It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.”

“las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra”

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”