Buendia Quotes & Sayings

They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You get to a point where you really can't manage more artists, because representing artists takes a lot of time. — Larry Gagosian

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn't talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college. — Adam Ant

Jose Arcadio Buendia took his wife's words literally. He looked out the window and saw the barefoot children in the sunny garden and he had the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Ursula's spell. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing — David Lodge

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

We have to bring in the railroad,' he said.
That was the first time the word had ever been heard in Macondo. Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans that Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?"
What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party."
You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride."
That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

My planes of understanding moved, and I felt it all at once and separately at the same time. For a moment, art was faith, and understanding that concept was art in itself, too. — Bryan Hutchinson

No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick. — G.K. Chesterton

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude- 205 — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There is no safety, and so we must touch and be touched, and we must fall and fly. — Katherine Catmull

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

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you. — David Keirsey