Quotes from The General in His Labyrinth

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

“I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“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, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“I go to seek a great perhaps”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

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

“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, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“I have no friends," he said. "And if I do have any left it won't be for long.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“In his paradise in Lima he had spent a joyous night with a young girl who was covered with fine, straight down over every millimeter of her Bedouin skin. At dawn, while he was shaving, he looked at her lying naked in the bed, adrift in the peaceful sleep of a satisfied woman, and he could not resist the temptation of possessing her forever with a sacramental act. He covered her from head to foot with shaving lather, and with a pleasure like that of love he shaved her clean with his razor, sometimes using his right hand and sometimes his left as he shaved every part of her body, even the eyebrows that grew together, and left her doubly naked inside her magnificent newborn's body. She asked, her soul in shreds, if he really loved her, and he answered with the same ritual phrase he had strewn without pity in so many hearts throughout his life: "More than anyone else in this world.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

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

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

“أولياري رجل عظيم و جندي ممتاز وصديق وفي، لكنه يدوّن كل شيء وليس هناك ما هو أخطر من الذكريات المدونة”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“I'm at the mercy of a destiny that isn't mine.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“And there's nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

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

“[F]or fate granted him the immense good fortune of losing his memory.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“America is half a world gone mad.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“I'm old, sick, tired, disillusioned, harassed, slandered, and unappreciated.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“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, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“He finished shaving by touch, still walking around the room, for he tried to see himself in the mirror as little as possible so he would not have to look into his own eyes.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“Let me be, he said. Despair is the health of the damned.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“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, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“Don't stay with Urdanetea, he told him. And don't go with your family to the United States. It's omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“لقد ثبت مرات كثيرة عبر تاريخ البشرية الطويل أن الرغبة هي الابنة الشرعية للحاجة.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

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

“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, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“لا نريد منكم مزيدا من الإحسان بقولكم لنا ماعلينا عمله. لا تحاولوا أن تعلمونا كيف يجب أن نكون،لا تسعوا إلى جعلنا مثلكم،ولا تنتظروا منا أن نحقق خلال عشرين سنة،بشكل جيد،ماحققتموه بشكل سئ خلال ألفي سنة.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

“دعني بحالي. فاليأس هو الصحة للخاسرين.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The General in His Labyrinth

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Popular quotes

“How can we tell whether the rules which we "guess" at are really right if we cannot analyze the game very well? There are, roughly speaking, three ways.

First, there may be situations where nature has arranged, or we arrange nature, to be simple and to have so few parts that we can predict exactly what will happen, and thus we can check how our rules work. (In one corner of the board there may be only a few chess pieces at work, and that we can figure out exactly.)

A second good way to check rules is in terms of less specific rules derived from them. For example, the rule on the move of a bishop on a chessboard is that it moves only on the diagonal. One can deduce, no matter how many moves may be made, that a certain bishop will always be on a red square. So, without being able to follow the details, we can always check our idea about the bishop's motion by finding out whether it is always on a red square. Of course it will be, for a long time, until all of a sudden we find that it is on a black square (what happened of course, is that in the meantime it was captured, another pawn crossed for queening, and it turned into a bishop on a black square). That is the way it is in physics. For a long time we will have a rule that works excellently in an over-all way, even when we cannot follow the details, and then some time we may discover a new rule. From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are of course in the new places, the places where the rules do not work—not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

The third way to tell whether our ideas are right is relatively crude but prob-ably the most powerful of them all. That is, by rough approximation. While we may not be able to tell why Alekhine moves this particular piece, perhaps we can roughly understand that he is gathering his pieces around the king to protect it, more or less, since that is the sensible thing to do in the circumstances. In the same way, we can often understand nature, more or less, without being able to see what every little piece is doing, in terms of our understanding of the game.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from The Feynman Lectures on Physics

“Just as your hand has the power to hide the sun, mediocrity has the power to hide your inner light. Do not blame others for your own incompetence.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Warrior of the Light

“I never wanted anything but you, Jake… And I wanted you before I even knew you… You’re everything I ever wanted, darling.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from The Will

“I fuck you, nobody else does. Which hole I fuck is up for negotiation.”
― Joanna Wylde, quote from Reaper's Property

“To conjure, even for a moment, the wistfulness which is the past is like trying to gather in one's arms the hyacinth colour of the distance. But if it is once achieved, what sweetness! - like the gentle, fugitive fragrance of spring flowers, dried with bergamot and bay" ~ From Mary Webb's introduction to her novel Precious Bane”
― Mary Webb, quote from Precious Bane

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