Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes (135 Quotes)

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

In reality they were distracted letters intendedto keep the coals alive witgout putting her hand in the fire while FA burned himself alive in every line .

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.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

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.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

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

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

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.

She began to study with a teacher of teachers, whom they brought for that purpose from the city of Mompox, and who died unexpectedly two weeks later, and she continued for several years with the best musician at the seminary, whose gravedigger's breath distorted her arpeggios.

The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.

After searching for it uselessly in the taste of the earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms.

In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

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

By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money. That's the lowest kind of whore.

It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

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

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.

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

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

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

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

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

The weak would never entered th kingdom of love.

Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained.

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

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.

For at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.

The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not-when they strayed form the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.

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

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.

There is always something left to love.

He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.

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.

Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.

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.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

They kept a clean and neat house. Rebeca would open it wide at dawn and the wind from the graveyard would come in through the windows and go out through the doors to the yard and leave the whitewashed walls and furniture tanned by the saltpeter of the dead.

He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster

I've remained a virgin for you.

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

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simple-mindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long.

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.

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

He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.