Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.Collection: Age
The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.Collection: Romantic
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.Collection: Thinking
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.Collection: Disbelief
His place was always set at the table, in case he rturned from the dead without warning .Collection: Warning
Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.Collection: Pain
In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.Collection: Book
More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.Collection: Mother
He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughterCollection: War
It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.Collection: Butterfly
Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.Collection: Flower
I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.Collection: Thinking
With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.Collection: Heart
He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.Collection: People
In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.Collection: Reality
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.Collection: Book
In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentina Ariza asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Noriega calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. She said, 'Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.Collection: Spiritual
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.Collection: Night
There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.Collection: Dying Alone
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.Collection: Fate
Taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.Collection: Taught
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.Collection: Giving Up
The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.Collection: Falling In Love
Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.Collection: Knowing
She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.Collection: Eye
He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.Collection: Differences
I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.Collection: Poetic License
The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.Collection: August
He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.Collection: Common Sense
Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.Collection: Love Is
The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.Collection: Night
I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.Collection: Clouds
There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.Collection: Thinking
There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.Collection: Age
One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Song
It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.Collection: Couple
There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heartCollection: Heart
Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.Collection: Monday
A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.Collection: Morning
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.Collection: Despite
Morality, too, is a question of time.Collection: Morality
Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.Collection: Kissing
The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed form the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.Collection: Lust
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.Collection: Dog
Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.Collection: Way
In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.Collection: Long
It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.Collection: Impossible
It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.Collection: Distance