Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love

We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. 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.

Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where ones faith had been, making it impossible to forget.

In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain.

But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.

I dont have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite.

She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom,and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide them with the security they need in order to face life.

Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Terneras bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José 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 back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.

I am condemned to a theatrical destiny.

...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.

Take care, said Delaura. Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.Saint Thomas said it, and I will be guided by him, said the Abbess: One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth.

The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change in position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...

Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girls wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house.

literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.

She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death.

The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet.May God have mercy on you, he said. And erased him from his heart.

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.