Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes & Sayings

She lay on her back in bed for a long time thinking and when she returned to school an hour early she was beyond all desire to cry and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with her claws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined her life. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love ... — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The captain gave the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country ... — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I'll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of
her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of
hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,
and four days ago. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.' — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Under the burning sun on the street I began to feel the weight of my ninety years, and to count minute by minute the minutes of the nights I had left before I died. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 Garcia Marquez

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The city drowned in memories. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He always believed he loved his daughter, but the fear of rabies obliged the Marquis to admit to himself that this was a lie for the sake of convenience. Bernarda, on the other hand, did not even ask herself the question, for she knew very well she did not love the girl and the girl did not love her, and both things seemed fitting. A good part of the hatred each of them felt for Sierva Maria was caused by the other's qualities in her. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fermina, he said, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

...he did not dare to play forbidden games with a woman who had proven too many times that she knew the dark side of the moon — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The mayor informed General Petronio San Roman of the episode, down to the last literal phrase, in an alarming telegram. General San Roman must have followed his son's wishes to the letter, because he didn't come for him, but sent his wife with their daughters and two other older women who seemed to be her sisters. They came on a cargo boat, locked in mourning up to their necks because of Bayardo San Roman's misfortunes, and with their hair hanging loose in grief. Before stepping onto land, they took off their shoes and went barefoot through the streets up to the hilltop in the burning dust of noon, pulling out strands of hair by the roots and wailing loudly with such high-pitched shrieks that they seemed to be shouts of joy. I watched them pass from Magdalena Oliver's balcony, and I remember thinking that distress like theirs could only be put on in order to hide other, greater shames. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Unknown guests, with invincible and worldly carousers, and it became necessary — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps perpetuate love — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She would get up at eleven o'clock, completely nude, in the bathroom, killing scorpions as she came out of her dense and prolonged sleep. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but ... none was as specific as old age. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have no friends," he said. "And if I do have any left it won't be for long. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The worst of a bad situation is that it makes us tell lies. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 slaughter — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was October. A difficult morning to get through, even for a man like himself, who had survived so many mornings like this one. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Father Nicanor was against a religious ceremony and burial in consecrated ground.
Ursula stood up to him. In a way that neither you nor I can understand, that man was a saint, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They did not speak of it the first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 Garcia Marquez

It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

But he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Music is important for one's health. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself in every line. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Reading had become his insatiable vice. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Common prick of conscience. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Surrealism runs through the streets, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She answered him sincerely that she would never marry a man who was so simple that he had wasted almost an hour and even went without lunch just to see a woman taking a bath. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They all saw him come out, and they all understood that now he knew they were going to kill him — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It can'r rain for ever — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Look at the mess we've got ourselves into,' Colonel Aureliano Buendia said at that time, 'just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: Only God knows how much I loved you — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds, and she had straight black hair that reached to her shoulders, and an aura of antiquity that could just as well have been Indonesian as Andean. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a raw silk blouse with very delicate flowers, natural linen trousers, and shoes with a narrow stripe the color of bougainvillea. 'This is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen,' I thought, when I saw her pass by with the stealthy stride of a lioness, while I waited in the check-in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for the plane to New York. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Even when I don't have to write, I arrange it every morning with the pointless rigor that has made me lose so many lovers. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That's why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She was impressed by its simplicity and its seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I returned home tormented by the little demon who whispers into our ear the devastating replies we didn't give at the right time, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They looked like two children, she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The oppressiveness of twilight filled the world. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

With "The Thousand and One Nights", I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Dr Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams ... — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning ... to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Think of love as a state of grace not as a means to anything ... but an end in itself. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She began to study with a teacher of teachers, whom they brought for that purpose from the city of Mompox, and who died unexpectedly two weeks later, and she continued for several years with the best musician at the seminary, whose gravedigger's breath distorted her arpeggios. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Our code of ethics supposes that wedoctors are made of wood . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I am not talking to you," said Abrenuncio. "I think in Low Latin. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He was begining to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Maybe I'll have a tumour like his someday. At first it will be a small but growing sphere that will branch out, growing larger in my stomach like a fetus. I will probably feel it when it starts to take motion, moving inward with the fury of a sleepwalking child, traveling through my intestines blindly - — Gabriel Garcia Marquez