Top 360 Quotes & Sayings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Page 2

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.

Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.

Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

For those who may be hurting over lost love: Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened.

There is always something left to love.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.

...they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. Florentino Ariza, Love in the Time of Cholera

Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.

"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

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

All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

The only everyday and eternal reality was love.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.

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.

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

We'll grow old waiting.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

She was lost in her longing to understand.

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

Music is important for one's health.