Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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.

Gabriel García Márquez
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

Gabriel García Márquez
For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

Gabriel García Márquez
I've always been convinced that my true profession is that of journalist.

Gabriel García Márquez
The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.

Gabriel García Márquez
It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.

Gabriel García Márquez
The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

Gabriel García Márquez
They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

Gabriel García Márquez
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Gabriel García Márquez
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

Gabriel García Márquez
When he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

Gabriel García Márquez
The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.

Gabriel García Márquez
I couldn't tell you because even I don't know who I am yet.

Gabriel García Márquez
Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

Gabriel García Márquez
Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

Gabriel García Márquez
It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

Gabriel García Márquez
A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

Gabriel García Márquez
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

Gabriel García Márquez
The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

Gabriel García Márquez
He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.
Jose Aracadio speaking

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

Gabriel García Márquez
… nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Gabriel García Márquez