Fatality makes us invisible.

She was lost in her longing to understand.

The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

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

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

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.

The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don’t understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

We are the orphans of our son.

‘You’re a great man, General, greater than anyone,’ she told him. ‘But love is still too big for you.

Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

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.

You can’t eat hope,? the woman said. You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,? the colonel replied.

Cease, cows, life is short.

Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she’ll be sorry if she isn’t guided by her heart.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams.

I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration.

Europeans, he said, “insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.

I’ll never fall in love again… it’s like having two souls at the same time.

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.

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

My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house.

Time was not passing…it was turning in a circle.

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

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.

And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.

Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good part is that it gives energy.

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 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.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.

I’ve said that anyone who doesn’t contradict himself is a dogmatist, and every dogmatist is a reactionary.

Escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide

Fame invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world.

Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.

I don’t think you can write a book that’s worth anything without extraordinary discipline.

My literary background was basically in poetry, but bad poetry, since only through bad poetry can you get to good poetry.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

Sometimes you will talk so that he cannot answer. Sometimes you will be so silent that he will not dare to speak in front of you.

If you give him another chance, you are willing to deceive yourself again.

It is happiness if you laugh together, If you cry together, it is friendship; but if you are silent together, this is real love.

If you have some mind; When you cannot find the conditions you want for happiness, you should know how to be happy under the conditions you find.

If you give him another chance, you are willing to deceive yourself again.

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

We’ll grow old waiting.

It was a love of perpetual flight.

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

If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told.

My vocabulary is not very good. I have to keep looking for things in the dictionary.

Shortly before the end, with a gleam of joy, she suddenly realized that she had never been so close to someone she loved so much.

He told her that love was an unnatural feeling, condemning two strangers to a petty and unhealthy dependency, the more ephemeral the more intense.

The world was so recent, that many things had no name, and to mention them you had to point them with your finger.

Life in the world… was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.

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

There had never been a death so foretold.

The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.

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.

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.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

But when a woman 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.

For those who may be hurting over lost love: Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.

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

Music is important for one’s health.

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

A spectacle … full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson.

A Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him.

A little good company, a little understanding, even a little love is all they need, and they often appreciate it. A little of everything, of course, because his loneliness is insatiable

A drug more harmful than the so-called heroic drugs has entered the national culture: easy money. The idea flourished that the law is the greatest obstacle to happiness, that learning to read and write is useless, that one lives better and safer as a criminal than as good people. In short: the state of social perversion typical of every larvae war.

A city full of immigrants, without a soul still behind its glass buildings and concrete highways, where success is measured in millions of bolivars, Caracas does not have time to recognize talents that are not consecrated in advance – Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.

Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

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.

Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.

Shame has a poor memory.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

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

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

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.

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

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.

His mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.

She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.

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

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Children’s lies are signs of great talent.

The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.

No place in life is sadder than an empty bed.

Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down

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

A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.

Fate makes us invisible.

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

Necessity has the face of a dog.

He is ugly and sad … but he is all love.

He has done more than anyone for the Spanish language since Cervantes.

Justice … limps along, but it gets there all the same.

I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love

The only thing that comes for sure is death, colonel.

The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.

To oppression… we respond with life.

Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.

Inspiration gives no warnings.

Old people, with other old people, are not so old.

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

I don’t have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It’s not a scientific thing.

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.

I am not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

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.

Finally 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 together like dogs.

The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.

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.

[Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s] orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.

He succeeded in having Macondo raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past.

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

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.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day

I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.

The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.

Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.

Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work… It’s much more important to write than to be written about.

A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.

As a writer I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

I must try and break through the clinches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality, we are all alone.

If God hadn’t rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.

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

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

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

People doomed to live 100 years of solitude have no second chance on this earth.

A person does not die when he should but when he can.

The only thing that matters in life is to be able to love and to be loved in return.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but no vision.

Life is the great art of being alive.

Love is the only thing that allows us to live without fear.

The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole.

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

I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.

Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

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

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

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.

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.

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.

Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.

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 it itself.

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

Do not allow me to forget you.

Only God knows how much I love you.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

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

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

Don’t struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

The duty of the writers is not to preserve the language but to open the way for it in history.

The grammarians burst with anger at our blunders but those of the next century pick them up as genius of the language. So rest assured: there is no lawsuit. See you in the third millennium.

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

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

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

Life is the best thing that has ever been invented.

It is life, more than death, that has no limits.

Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.

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.

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.