868 Quotes by Gabriel García Márquez

After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip.

Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget.

our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.

Una noche se embadurnaron de pies a cabeza con melocotones en almíbar, se lamieron como perros y se amaron como locos en el piso del corredor, y fueron despertados por un torrente de hormigas carniceras que se disponían a devorarlos vivos

Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary attitudes had their origins in the example of the wise Catalonian, for whom wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.

wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change in position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.

Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with.