Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

We men are the slaves of prejudice,' he had once said to her. '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.

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.

I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.

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.

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 heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.

... 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!

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

I'll 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. "It's like having two souls at the same time.

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 girl's wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house.

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

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

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.

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

Of Love and Other Demons (Vintage International) - Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez (Highlight: 5; Note: 0)-------------"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."(Chapter:Chapter Two)"What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you. And regarding that there can be no doubt, for it is He in His infinite diligence who has enlightened us so that we may offer you this consolation.”"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"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.”"(Chapter:Chapter Three)". He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. "(Chapter:Chapter Five)

Shame has poor memory.

It is easier to start a war than to end it.

I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

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

But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. (4.113)

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

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.

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.

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

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 husband's side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

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.

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

t nightfall, atthe oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes roseout of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirredthe certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.

She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.

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

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.

Remember that everything that is good, whatever it’s origin, comes from the holy spirit.

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 of 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.

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

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 man's 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.

The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.

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.