Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

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

Gabriel García Márquez
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

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
Because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one's honor, and remain imperturbable even when forced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.

Gabriel García Márquez
Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

Gabriel García Márquez
And realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

Gabriel García Márquez
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

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
His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

Gabriel García Márquez
He was weary of the uncertainty of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.

Gabriel García Márquez
A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

Gabriel García Márquez
Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

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

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