Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed is as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before.

The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young mans blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days. And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, 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.

Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal.

He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

Merciful God! sighed the General. Weve arrived. And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world.

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, whats the rest of it?

She was lost in her longing to understand.

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. It is true, he replied, but you would do well not to believe it.

She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. My God! Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. What I wouldn’t have given for a love like this!

She was impressed by its simplicity and its seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

He was still too young to know that the hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kidding on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

...as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth...

our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.

Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.

The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.