Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

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.
Gabriel García Márquez
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.
Gabriel García Márquez
While a person does not give up on sex sex does not give up on the person.
Gabriel García Márquez
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
Gabriel García Márquez
The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability.
Gabriel García Márquez
[A mother] discovers 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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly -
Gabriel García Márquez
You can't come in, colonel," she told him. "You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house.
Gabriel García Márquez
The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
Gabriel García Márquez
I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.
Gabriel García Márquez
Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves.
Gabriel García Márquez
Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
Gabriel García Márquez
During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
..he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,..
Gabriel García Márquez
All that Delaura noticed, though, was the uproarious crowing of the roosters.'There are only six of them, but they make enough noise for a hundred,' said the Abbess. 'Furthermore, a pig spoke and a goat gave birth to triplets.' And she added with fervor: 'Everything has been like this since your Bishop did us the favor of sending us his poisoned gift.'She viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura. As they walked across it she pointed out to Delaura that there were flowers of exceptional size and color, some with an unbearable scent. As far as she was concerned, everything ordinary has something supernatural about it.
Gabriel García Márquez
Children inherit their parents' madness.
Gabriel García Márquez
The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
Gabriel García Márquez
He walked out into a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of his youth, where the shadowy widowsfrom five o'clock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, not they, who crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not his midnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months and four days.
Gabriel García Márquez
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking ofher for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out ofhand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,and four days ago.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love 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. (Love in the Time of Cholera)
Gabriel García Márquez
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
Gabriel García Márquez
...as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror...only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.
Gabriel García Márquez
At eight-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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.
Gabriel García Márquez
Remember that everything that is good, whatever it’s origin, comes from the holy spirit.
Gabriel García Márquez
What worries me is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.
Gabriel García Márquez
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)
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
Gabriel García Márquez
She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home.
Gabriel García Márquez
I nee to reason for a plague, ... As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us.
Gabriel García Márquez
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
Gabriel García Márquez
Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors,
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's 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, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
Gabriel García Márquez
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's 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.
Gabriel García Márquez
Be calm. God awaits you at the door.
Gabriel García Márquez
...he considered respect for one's given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.
Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Gabriel García Márquez