Quotes from Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel García Márquez ·  160 pages

Rating: (43.9K votes)


“Do not allow me to forget you”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


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


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


“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, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“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, quote from Of Love and Other Demons



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


“Le dijo que el amor era un sentimiento contra natura, que condenaba a dos desconocidos a una dependencia mezquina e insalubre, tanto más efímera cuanto más intensa.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


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


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


“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, quote from Of Love and Other Demons



“No hay medicina que no cure lo que no cura la felicidad.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“I live in fear of being alive.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“Ella le preguntó por esos días si era verdad, como decían las canciones, que el amor lo podía todo. «Es verdad», le contestó él, «pero harás bien en no creerlo»”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited:
"O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow." She did not understand.
"It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother," he explained. "He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did."
"Was he a priest too?"
"A soldier," he said.
Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering.
"I am always in this state," he said.
And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask:
"And now?"
"And now nothing," he said. "It is enough for me that you know."
He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads.
Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me," she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: "What's the rest of it?"
"I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end," he said.
She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons



“An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“Aren't you afraid you will be damned?'
'I believe I already am, but not by the Holy Spirit,' said Delaura without alarm. 'I have always believed He attributes more importance to love than to faith.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“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, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“Ningún loco está loco si uno se conforma con sus razones.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“«¿Y mientras tanto?», preguntó el marqués.
«Mientras tanto», dijo Abrenuncio, «tóquenle música, llenen la casa de flores, hagan cantar los pájaros, llévenla a ver los atardeceres en el mar, denle todo lo que pueda hacerla feliz». Se despidió con un voleo del sombrero en el aire y la sentencia latina de rigor. Pero esta vez la tradujo en honor del marqués: «No hay medicina que cure lo que no cura la felicidad»”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons



“Así se reanudó una amistad prohibida que por lo menos una vez se pareció al amor. Hablaban hasta el amanecer, sin ilusiones ni despecho, como un viejo matrimonio condenado a la rutina. Creían ser felices, y tal vez lo eran, hasta que uno de los dos decía una palabra de más, o daba un paso de menos, y la noche se pudría en un pleito de vándalos que desmoralizaba a los mastines. Todo volvía entonces al principio, y Dulce Olivia desaparecía de la casa por largo tiempo.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“Siempre había pensado que dejar de creer causaba una cicatriz imborrable en el lugar donde estuvo la fe y que impedía olvidarla.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


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


“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, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


“When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, what's the rest of it?”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons



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


“One never quite stops believing,' said the Marquis. 'Some doubt remains forever.' Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


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


“Non c'è medicina che guarisca quello che non guarisce la felicità”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Of Love and Other Demons


About the author

Gabriel García Márquez
Born place: in Aracataca, Magdalena, Colombia
Born date March 6, 1927
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