“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”

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

“He was aware he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be obstacle to their inventing true love.”

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

“But in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body.”

“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!”

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”