Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

He walked out into a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of his youth, where the shadowy widowsfrom five oclock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, not they, who crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not his midnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months and four days.

Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking ofher for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out ofhand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,and four days ago.

Florentino Ariza never had anotheropportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chanceencounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and ninemonths and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternalfidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow.

The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.

Children inherit their parents madness.

All that Delaura noticed, though, was the uproarious crowing of the roosters.There are only six of them, but they make enough noise for a hundred, said the Abbess. Furthermore, a pig spoke and a goat gave birth to triplets. And she added with fervor: Everything has been like this since your Bishop did us the favor of sending us his poisoned gift.She viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura. As they walked across it she pointed out to Delaura that there were flowers of exceptional size and color, some with an unbearable scent. As far as she was concerned, everything ordinary has something supernatural about it.

..he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,..

He was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end.

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms.

Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves.

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.

I became another man. I tried to reread the classics that had guided me in adolescence, and I could not bear them. I buried myself in the romantic writings I had repudiated when my mother tried to impose them on me with a heavy hand, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love.

That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.

The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will.

You cant come in, colonel, she told him. You may be in command of your war, but Im in command of my house.

Maybe Ill have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.