Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.

The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.

A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.

Men demand much more than you think, she would tell her enigmatically. Theres a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.

Dont open that door, she said. The hallway is full of difficult dreams. And I asked her: How do you know? And she told me: Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.

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. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Shame has poor memory.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.

She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.

After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephews courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.

No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. “No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

No matter whom Im with Ill always be alone, she said. And she added with a roguish touch: Excellency.

I see nothing that can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor, he wrote to her. In the future you will be alone, although at your husbands side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation.

Ill never fall in love again, he once confessed to José Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. Its like having two souls at the same time.

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

... he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness.Damn it, he sighed. How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern:“they almost always have crystals in their heart.