Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

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The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.

Gabriel García Márquez
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

Gabriel García Márquez
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
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
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.

Gabriel García Márquez
It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

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

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

Gabriel García Márquez
Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one's life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.

Gabriel García Márquez
In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. 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. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.

Gabriel García Márquez
I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn't be able to work.

Gabriel García Márquez
They felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.

Gabriel García Márquez
Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.

Gabriel García Márquez
It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.

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

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
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Gabriel García Márquez
He imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously.

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

Gabriel García Márquez
Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother's experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: What does it feel like? José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: It's like an earthquake.

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
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

Gabriel García Márquez