Hundred Years Of Solitude Quotes

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

There is always something left to love.

...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...

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.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...

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.

[A]nd both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.

He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living 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 people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

What does he say?' he asked. 'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.' 'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Cease, cows, life is short.

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.

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.

Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

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

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.

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

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.

because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.

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

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

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

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.

The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.

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

The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

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.

El mundo habrá acabado de joderse -dijo entonces- el día en que los hombres viajen en primera clase y la literatura en el vagón de carga.

It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.

An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

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

The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

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

لا ينتسب الإنسان إلى أرض لا موتى له تحت ترابها

Children inherit their parents' madness.

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.

He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.

Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.

El mundo era tan reciente que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para nombrarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".

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.

In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

y que en cualquier lugar en que estuvieran recordaran siempre que el pasado era mentira, que la memoria no tenía caminos de regreso, que toda primavera antigua era irrecuperable, y que el amor más desatinado y tenaz era de todos modos una verdad efímera.

More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.

Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

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

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

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

بدأ يدرك كم يحب فى الواقع الأشخاص الذين كرههم أكثر من سواهم .

العالم سيتخوزق عندما يسافر البشر فى عربة الدرجة الاولى و الادب فى عربة الشحن

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...

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

من الأفضل ألا ننام , لأن الحياة ستصبح أكثر عطاء

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened.

Era lo último que iba quedando de un pasado cuyo aniquilamiento no se consumaba, porque seguía aniquilándose indefinidamente, consumiéndose dentro de sí mismo, acabándose a cada minuto pero sin acabar de acabarse jamás.

¡Carajo! -gritó. Amaranta, que empezaba a meter la ropa en el baúl, creyó que la había picado un alacrán. -¡Dónde está! -preguntó alarmada. -¿Qué? -¡El animal! -aclaró Amaranta. Úrsula se puso un dedo en el corazón. -Aquí -dijo.

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

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.

Apártense, vacas, que la vida es corta.

La necesidad de sentirse triste se le iba convirtiendo en un vicio a medida que le devastaban los años.

Science has eliminated distance,” Melquíades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.

... that the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth...

Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.

Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists".

قال: لكن لم يمت لنا أحد هنا. ولا ينتسب الإنسان إلى أرض لا موتى له تحت ترابها

From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud.

When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead. "Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy.

In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

Sin embargo, antes de llegar al verso final ya había comprendido que no saldría jamás de ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos ( o los espejismos) sería arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres en el instante en que Aureliano Babilonio acabara de descifrar los pergaminos, y que todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre, porque las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenian una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.

Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....

The world must be all fucked up,’ he said then, ‘when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.’ That was the last thing he was heard to say.

ومع ذلك، وقبل أن يصل إلى بيت الشعر الأخير، كان قد أدرك أنه لن يخرج ابداً من هذه الغرفة، لأنه مقدر لمدينة المرايا (أو السراب) أن تذروها الرياح، وتُنفى من ذاكرة البشر، في اللحظة التي ينتهي فيها أوريليانو بوينديا من حل رموز الرقاق، وأن كل ما هو مكتوب فيها لا يمكن أن يتكرر، منذ الأزل إلى الأبد، لأن السلالات المحكومة بمئة عام من العزلة، ليست لها فرصة أخرى على الأرض

On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.

Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

ليس في سوء طالعي , ثغـرة واحدة

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death...

Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that 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.

A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

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.

لقد أخذتم هذه اللعبة المرعبة علي محمل الجد, وقد احسنتم صنعا بذلك, لأنكم تقومون بواجبكم. لكن لا تنسوا أننا سنبقي أمهاتكم, مادام الله يمنحنا حياة. وأننا نملك الحق, مهما بلغت ثوريتكم, بأن ننزل بناطيلكم, ونضربكم علي مؤخراتكم لدي أول إساءة للاحترام.

Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with.

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.

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 Márquez 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.

You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. This truth was once beautifully conveyed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his interpretation of a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. “This is a table,” “This is a window,” “This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning.” And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads “The name of our village is Macondo,” and the larger one reads “God exists.” The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life—the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone number of the first house we lived in when we got married—and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost.

She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.

They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.

For I say to you in all the sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone – when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will – then only will you have achieved. Thus only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that, a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought – the subtle rapture of a postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army.

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.

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated.