Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

...youll see, he said, theyll go back to dividing everything up among the priests, the gringos and the rich, and nothing for the poor, naturally, because theyve always been so fucked up that the day that shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole...

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 pretence 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 am generous 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 suppressed rage, that I am punctual only only to hide how little I care about other peoples time.

It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good

The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.

...he considered respect for ones given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husbands step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.

Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.

But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us its a natural death. He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. What worries me, he went on, is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, youve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.