Gabriel Marquez Quotes

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

my heart has more rooms in it than a whore house

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.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .

Cease, cows, life is short.

Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

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.

El secreto de una buena vejez no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.

He was still too young to know that the 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. But when he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy vicitim to the charitible deceptions of nostalgia.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment

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.

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.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

I’ve remained a virgin for you.

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Le dijo que el amor era un sentimiento contra natura, que condenaba a dos desconocidos a una dependencia mezquina e insalubre, tanto más efímera cuanto más intensa.

Todavia era demasiado joven para saber que la memoria del corazón elimina los malos recuerdos y magnifica los buenos, y que gracias a ese artificio logramos sobrellevar el pasado.

Think of love as a state of grace not as a means to anything... but an end in itself.

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.

Si vas a volverte loco, vuelve te solo

Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.

Siempre pensé que morir de amor solo era una licencia poética.

Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

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

Había estado en la muerte, en efecto, pero había regresado porque no pudo soportar la soledad.

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.

She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

Esa mirada casual fue el origen de un cataclismo de amor que medio siglo después aún no había terminado.

La fatalidad nos hace invisibles

Poco antes del final, con un destello de júbilo, se dio cuenta de pronto que nunca había estado tan cerca de alguien a quien amaba tanto

Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?" What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party." You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride." That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said. Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile: Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone.

También el amor se aprende

It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.

The past was a lie, memory has no return, every spring gone by could never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Un buen escritor se aprecia mejor por lo que rompe que por lo que publica.

Friend is the person that holds your hand and touches your heart!

He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.

Ella encontró siempre la manera de rechazarlo porque aunque no conseguía quererlo, ya no podía vivir sin el.

List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness 1. Italo Calvino 2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths 4. The creator of MySpace 5. Richard Brautigan 6. J.K. Rowling 7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite 8. Ann Sexton 9. David Foster Wallace 10. Gaugin and the Caribbean 11. Charles Schulz 12. Liam Rector

The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.

Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,’ he said. ‘That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" In reality, "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" were probably not Simon Bolivar's last words (although he did, historically, say them). His last words may have been "Jose! Bring the luggage. They do not want us here." The significant source for "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" is also Alaska's source, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in his Labyrinth.

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

Fatality makes us invisible.

The majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

I can't think of any film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people.

Era por fin la vida real, con mi corazón a salvo, y condenado a morir de buen amor en la agonía feliz de cualquier día después de mis cien años.

That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later.

Look at the mess we've got ourselves into,' Colonel Aureliano Buendia said at that time, 'just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.

y el gozo que le produjo esa mujer, le había permitido entender por que los hombres tenían miedo a la muerte" CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD

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

(...) os seres humanos não nascem para sempre no dia em que as suas mães os dão à luz, mas que a vida os obriga uma e outra vez ainda a parirem-se a si mesmos.

How strange men are.' she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. 'They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts.

The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.

Ya lo verán, decía, se volverán a repartir todo entre los curas, los gringos y los ricos, y nada para los pobres... porque éstos estarán siempre tan jodidos que el día en que la mierda tenga algún valor los pobres nacerán sin culo".

El chófer me previno: Cuidado, sabio, en esa casa matan. Le contesté: Si es por amor no importa.

Science has eliminated distance.

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

Arcadio found the formality of death rediculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

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

The wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune monent.

By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. "Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger.

La vida no es la vida que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda y cómo recuerda para contarla

[S]he 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.

Marquez was not born in Colombia. He was born in Macondo, And his Macondo is his La Mancha.

Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing like dogs.

Dadme un prejuicio y moveré el mundo.

bagiku, tampak bahwa, bagaikan tanaman yg hidup, aku merupakan gambaran suatu dunia yang ideal; bahwa aku bukan hanya terdiri dari apa yang kuingin, apa yang kupikir -- aku juga adalah apa yang tidak aku cintai; apa yang TIDAK aku inginkan untuk menjelma

Lo tocó murmurando la letra, con el violín bañado en lágrimas, y con una inspiración tan intensa que a los primeros compases empezaron a ladrar los perros de la calle, y luego los de la ciudad, pero después se fueron callando poco a poco por el hechizo de la música, y el valse terminó con un silencio sobrenatural. El balcón no se abrió, ni nadie se asomó a la calle, ni siquiera el sereno que casi siempre acudía con su candil tratando de medrar con las migajas de las serenatas. El acto fue un conjuro de alivio para Florentino Ariza, pues cuando guardó el violin en el estuche y se alejó por las calles muertas sin mirar hacia atrás, no sentía ya que iba la mañana siguinte, sino que se había ido desde hacía muchos años con la disposición irrevocable de no volver jamás.

The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read that line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago

Around the time they were preparing Jose Arcadio for the seminary she had already made a detailed recapitulation of life in the house since the founding of Macondo and had completely changed the opinion that she had always had of its descendants. She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone... Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. It was during that time that Ursula began to speak Rebeca's name, bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebeca , the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the whiteness of the walls... Rebeca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce womb, was the only one who had the unbridled courage that Ursula had wanted for her line.

It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code.

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning Ursula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end in a placid swoon and she had already asked them to take her to Father Antonio Isabel, when Santa Sofia de la Piedad discovered that her back was paved with leeches. She took them off one by one, crushing them with a firebrand before they bled her to death.

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.

[...] not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear, and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude.

Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supereme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities.

It is life, more than death, that has no limits. Love becomes greater and nobler and mightier in calamity. We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a women 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. Let time pass and we will see what it brings. Humanity, like the armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest. Those of us who make the rules have the greatest obligation to abide by them. I don't believe in God but I am afraid of him. It's better to arrive in time than to be invited. Unfaithful but not disloyal. Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. Nobody teaches life anything. The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. There is no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid and dangerous, than a poet. Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. One comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays and whoever doesn't use them for whatever reason, one's own and someone else's, willingly or unwillingly, looses them forever.

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.