Living to Tell the Tale

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.

I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence

Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. no one was safe from its onslaught.

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.

With "The Thousand and One Nights", I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.

It took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad.

They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again—not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in a irreparable world, where everything had already been lost.

Nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing.

The audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her: "I give you my life in this rose.

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.

They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different

I soaked the conversations up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.

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.

I understood that he was my host, though he only glanced at me and walked by, and I did not have the audacity to signal to him in any way. He hurried into the station and came out again minutes later with no expression of hope. At last he saw me and pointed with his index finger: "You're Gabito, right?" I answered him with all my heart: "Almost, now.

Gabito isn't deceiving anyone," she said with an innocent smile, "but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.

...Macondo Esta palabra me había llamado la atención desde los primeros viajes con mi abuelo, pero sólo de adulto descubrí que me gustaba su resonancia poética.

The move to Arcata was seen by my grandparents as a journey into forgetting.

The colonel, pursued by sinister remorse for having killed a man in an affair of honor, brought everything necessary for recreating the past as far away as possible from his bad memories

Each thing, just by looking at it, aroused in me an irresistible longing to write so I would not die. I had suffered this on other occasions, but only on that morning did I recognize it as a crisis of inspiration, that word, abominable but so real, that demolishes everything in its path in order to reach its ashes in time.

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.

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank.

Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

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

Dawns in the dormitory had a suspicious resemblance to happiness.

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.

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.