Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good

~ Gabriel García Márquez

The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.

~ 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

...he considered respect for one's given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

~ 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

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

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ 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

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

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

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

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

~ 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

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

Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Gabriel García Márquez

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

~ 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

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 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

...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

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

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

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

Children inherit their parents' madness.

~ 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

..he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,..

~ Gabriel García Márquez