“I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.”

“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.”

“four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.”

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”

“For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

“Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.”

“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”