Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)

“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”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“A friend, who does not understand, simply, is not as good as one thought”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“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”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“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
In Evil Hour

“A lost bird appeared in the courtyard and spent about half an hour jumping around like an invalid among the tuberose. She sang a progressive note, rising an octave each time, until she got so sharp that it was necessary to imagine her.”
Gabriel García Márquez
In Evil Hour

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“A Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“A spectacle … full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“Actually, the most difficult process for me was becoming someone else. Personality change is a daily struggle in which you often rebel against your own determination to change, and want to remain yourself. So the greatest difficulty was not learning, as you might think, but my unconscious resistance to both physical and behavioral changes. I had to resign myself to stop being the man I had always been and become a very different man, unsuspected by the same repressive police that had forced me to leave my country, and unrecognizable even by my own friends.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Clandestine in Chile

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“As always happens, we thought we were very far from being happy then, and now we think the opposite. It’s the trick of nostalgia, removing bitter moments from their place and painting them another color, and putting them back where they no longer hurt.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
The Scandal of the Century

“As I hear him, I understand that he’s not more moronic because of the brandy than he is because of his cowardice.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Leaf Storm and Other Stories

“Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most… he saw fireflies where there were none.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“But he must have known the reason for those changes.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“But in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“But power – like love – is double-edged: it is exercised and suffered.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“Coquetry is a vice that is not satisfied with anything.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control. “The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,” he would say.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“Ever since then they were still linked by a serious affection, but without the disorder of love, and she had so much respect for him that she never again went to bed with anyone if he was present.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“Everyone will have gone then except us, because we’re tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs’ horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We’ve been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they’ll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn’t passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Leaf Storm and Other Stories

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“He could be heard moving about in his room with a tormented and maddening insistence, as if on those nights he was receiving the ghost of the man he had been until then, and both of the them, the past man and the present one, were locked in a silent struggle in which the past one was defending his wrathful solitude, his invulnerable standoffish way, his intransigent manners; and the present one his terrible and unchangeable will to free himself from his own previous man.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
Leaf Storm

“He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He had the almost magical faculty of not finding out about the things he could not bear.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“He has the face of someone called Esteban.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“He looked so forever dead, so defenseless, so much like their men.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He pretended to be deaf, although in the end she managed to forget better than he, because he was left without memory.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of 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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He succumbed to depression, gave up eating, slept poorly, lost his way, and opted for the compassionate solution of dying once and not dying millions of times each day.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“He was Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat it for them to recognize him.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, ‘Damn it,’ he sighed. ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“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
Of Love and Other Demons

“Here the only one who has the right to prohibit anything is the government, we live in a democracy.”
Gabriel García Márquez
In Evil Hour

“His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“His pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“His two greatest virtues are determination and patience. That at first glance they seem contradictory, but life has shown him that they are not.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“I couldn’t bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“I had decided not to worry about my body, but now I see that I must take certain detective novel precautions so that no one finds it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“I have a lot to do, and I have to do a lot of work, and I can do a great job, I can do it, I can do it, and I can do it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch

“I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“I think women hold the world in suspense, so it doesn’t fall apart while men try to push history. In the end, one wonders which of the two things will be the less sensible”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“I was neither thirsty nor hungry. He felt nothing apart from a general indifference to life and death. I thought I was dying. And that idea filled me with a strange and dark hope.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

“I’ll never fall in love again… it’s like having two souls at the same time.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In short, Latin American and Caribbean writers have to admit, hands on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are. Our destiny, maybe our glory, is to try to imitate it with humility, and as best we can.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
The Scandal of the Century

“In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is important that the law is not limited to the rules of the world, and that it is in the hands of the people of the world and the people who come to it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch

“It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“It pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“It took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship’s log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“It was she who did away with my generation’s virginity. She taught us much more than we should have learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an empty bed.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“It was, for the first time in her life, the wonder of being understood by a man who listened to her with all his soul without expecting the reward of sleeping with her.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“Life is the best thing that’s ever been invented.”
Gabriel García Márquez
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories

“Look there, where the wind is so peaceful … yes, over there, that’s Esteban’s village.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“Look, when one of the characters in the book is shot dead, a thread of his blood runs through the entire town until it reaches where the dead man’s mother is. Everything is like that, bordering on the sublime or the cheesy. Like the bolero”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. no one was safe from its onslaught.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“Not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“Nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“Nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“On the morning that they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat bishop was coming on.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“Only then did I become aware of how long and devastating the years of exile were. And not only for those who left, as I believed until then, but also for them: those who stayed.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Clandestine in Chile

“Only then did I realize that seat neighbors on airplanes, like old married couples, don’t say good morning to each other when they wake up. Neither did she.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“Other doctors lose as many patients as I do, he would say. But with me they die happier.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“Perhaps the most Colombian thing about the situation was the amazing ability of the people of Medellín to get used to everything, the good and the bad, with a power of recovery that is perhaps the cruelest formula for recklessness.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“She did everything in a methodical and leisurely way, as if there was nothing that was not planned for her from birth.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“She was the only person in the house, of either sex, who did not seem to have a heart pierced by the sorrow of thwarted love.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“She went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“She would go to sleep only once and that would be to die.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“Someone had told the General that when a dog died it had to be replaced without delay by another just like it, and with the same name, so you could go on believing it was the same animal. He did not agree. He always wanted them to be distinctive so he could remember them all with their own identities, their yearning eyes and eager spirits, and could mourn their deaths.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“That dawn he officiated at the daily mass of his ablutions with more frenetic severity than usual, trying to purge his body and spirit of twenty years of fruitless wars and the disillusionments of power.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“That was the state of the world when I began to be aware of my family environment, and I cannot evoke it in any other way: sorrows, griefs, uncertainties in the solitude of an immense house.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“That’s how one of my stories that has received the most praise from critics and, especially, from readers came to be published. However, that experience did not prevent me from continuing to rip up manuscripts I didn’t think were publishable, but rather taught me that it’s necessary to tear them in such a way that they can never be pieced back together.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Scandal of the Century

“The ability to keep on growing after death was … the nature of certain drowned men.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“The bad thing about this town is that the women have to stay alone in the house while the men walk through the mountains.”
Gabriel García Márquez
In Evil Hour

“The bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch

“The Buendías were not capable of loving, and that is the secret of their loneliness, of their frustration. Loneliness, for me, is the opposite of solidarity”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Fragrance of the Guava

“The experience taught him (Salvador Allende) too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Clandestine in Chile

“The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“The few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“The greatest victory of my life has been to make them forget me.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Strange Pilgrims

“The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“The human body is not made to endure all the years that one may live.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“The more they sobbed the more they felt like weeping.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“The move to Arcata was seen by my grandparents as a journey into forgetting.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“The only certainty was that they took everything with them: money, December breezes, the bread knife, thunder at 3 in the afternoon, the scent of jasmines, love. All that remained were the dusty almond trees, the reverberating streets, the houses of wood and roofs of rusting tin with their taciturn inhabitants, devastated by memories.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“The only thing that comes for sure is death.”
Gabriel García Márquez
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories

“The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The shocks continued but they hurt less: life had been in charge of teaching them that the happiness of love was not made to fall asleep in it but to screw each other together.”
Gabriel García Márquez
News of a Kidnapping

“The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she become to men.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The truth is that she spoke about her misfortune without any shame in order to cover up the other misfortune, the real one, that was burning in her insides.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“The vegetation on him came from faraway oceans and deep water.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“The weak would never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh & ungenerous kingdom & that women gives themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provides the security they need in order to face life”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world had been sad since Tuesday.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“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
Love in the Time of Cholera

“The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The worst of a bad situation is that it makes us tell lies.”
Gabriel García Márquez
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“There had never been a death so foretold.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“There is a moment when you no longer feel pain. Sensitivity disappears and reason begins to dull even when the notion of time and space is lost.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

“There is always something left to love.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“There is great power in the irresistible force of love.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth

“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
Love in the Time of Cholera

“They looked like two children,” she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she’d always felt that only children are capable of everything.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“They noticed too that he bore his death with pride.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“They saw it had no flags or mast and thought it was a whale.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel.”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Think of love as a state of grace not as a means to anything… but an end in itself.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“Think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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
Of Love and Other Demons

“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“We know of a time when he was a soldier and an ephemeral, but he doesn’t have another, General.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Autumn of the Patriarch

“Well, the military miracle has made very few rich many richer, and it has made the rest of Chileans much poorer.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Clandestine in Chile

“What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings”
Gabriel García Márquez
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

“When has there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World

“When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.” (Gabriel García Márquez Quotes)
Gabriel García Márquez
Of Love and Other Demons

“When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“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
One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?”
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

“With “The Thousand and One Nights”, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.”
Gabriel García Márquez
Living to Tell the Tale

“You’re a great man, General, greater than anyone,” she told him. “But love is still too big for you.”
Gabriel García Márquez
The General in His Labyrinth