Top 360 Quotes & Sayings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Page 3

This soup tastes like windows

She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

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.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

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.

If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.

I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. (Love in the Time of Cholera)

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.

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

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

Surrealism runs through the streets.

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

Nobody teaches life anything.

...The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .

The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.

To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.

Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.

And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love.

She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.

Sex is one's consolation when love is not enough

...and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.