Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

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The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.

Gabriel García Márquez
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.

Gabriel García Márquez
The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Gabriel García Márquez
Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.

Gabriel García Márquez
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friend a person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died."

Gabriel García Márquez
Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.

Gabriel García Márquez
He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.

Gabriel García Márquez
The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

Gabriel García Márquez
"A person fucks himself up so much," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, "Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can't do anything about it."

Gabriel García Márquez
When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead. "Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy.

Gabriel García Márquez
At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel Gerineldo Marquez. "Let's get out of here before the mosquitos in here execute you." Colonel Gerineldo Marquez could not express the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude.
"No, Aureliano," he replied. "I'd rather be dead than see you changed into a tyrant."
"You won't see me," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. "Put your shoes and help me get this shitty war over with."
When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one.

Gabriel García Márquez
For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

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
"Shit!" she shouted.
Amaranta, who was starting to put the clothes into the trunk, thought that she had been bitten by a scorpion.
"Where is it?" she asked in alarm.
"What?"
"The bug!" Amaranta said.
Úrsula put a finger on her heart.
"Here," she said.

Gabriel García Márquez
The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.

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
Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.

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

Gabriel García Márquez
Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.

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
A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.

Gabriel García Márquez
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.

Gabriel García Márquez
He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

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