“Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

“Florentino Ariza was left with the nagging suspicion that this was not her last word. He believed that when a woman says no, she is waiting to be urged before making her final decision, but with her he could not risk making the same mistake twice.”

“In a solemn way, as if he had just thought of it, he said: The world is moving ahead. Yes, I said, it's moving ahead, but it's revolving around the sun.”

“For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

“They did not speak of it the first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.”

“It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code.”

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”