Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved 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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Shame has poor memory.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. “No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered 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

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, 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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed is as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Merciful God! sighed the General. We've arrived. And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, what's the rest of it?

~ Gabriel García Márquez

She was lost in her longing to understand.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. My God! Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. What I wouldn’t have given for a love like this!

~ Gabriel García Márquez

She was impressed by its simplicity and its seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

...as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth...

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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.

~ Gabriel García Márquez