“We are the orphans of our son.”

“Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.”

“More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”

“Los viejos, entre viejos, son menos viejos.”

“Los síntomas del amor son los mismos del cólera.”

“It occurred to me that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission.”

“I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”