“the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered.”

“... never engage to play with a troubled mind or excited emotions. Lucidity of mind is crucial and once once's emotions become engaged in the play all is lost.....”

“And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.”

“Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.”

“Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.”

“That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.”