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.