Quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

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

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

“and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

“What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from 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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from 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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

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

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

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

“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

“Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?"
What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party."
You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride."
That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

“A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude

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