Quotes from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“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.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“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.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Siempre pensé que morir de amor solo era una licencia poética.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Descubrí que mi obsesión de que cada cosa estuviera en su puesto, cada asunto en su tiempo, cada palabra en su estilo, no era el premio merecido de una mente en orden, sino al contrario, todo un sistema de simulación inventado por mí para ocultar el desorden de mi naturaleza. Descubrí que no soy disciplinado por virtud, sino como reacción contra mi negligencia; que parezco generoso por encubrir mi mezquindad, que me paso de prudente por mal pensado, que soy conciliador para no sucumbir a mis cóleras reprimidas, que sólo soy puntual para que no se sepa cuan poco me importa el tiempo ajeno. Descubrí, en fin, que el amor no es un estado del alma sino un signo del zodíaco.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“الشهرة امرأة مفرطة في البدانة , لا يستطيع الرجل أن يضاجعها. لكنه يستيقظ من نومه يجدها قبالة السرير تنظر إليه”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“الجنس هو العزاء الذي يلجأ إليه المرء عندما لا يحصل على الحب”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love. Before I left at dawn I drew the lines of her hand on a piece of paper and gave it to Diva Sahibí for a reading so I could know her soul.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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“I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the”
― Scott O'Dell, quote from Island of the Blue Dolphins

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