The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

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.

Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood.

Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophical pretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. ... (He said that) rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

From there he saw Fermina Daza walk in on her son's arm, dressed in an unadorned long-sleeved black velvet dress buttoned all the way from her neck to the tips of her shoes, like a bishop's cassock, and a narrow scarf of Castilian lace instead of the veiled hat worn by other widows, and even by many other ladies who longed for that condition

Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.

siguió evocando hasta el amanecer las excelencias del marido, sin reprocharle otra deslealtad que la de haberse muerto sin ella, y redimida por la certidumbre de que nunca había sido tan suyo como lo era entonces, dentro de un cajón clavado con doce clavos de tres pulgadas, y a dos metros debajo de la tierra.—Soy feliz —dijo— porque sólo ahora sé con seguridad dónde está cuando no está en la casa.

It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions.