Gabriel Marquez Quotes & Sayings

Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

government guarantees on its word of honor — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Then she revived him with an ardor and skill he could not have imagined in the meager pleasures of his solitary lovemaking, and without glory deprived him of his virginity. He was fifty-two years old and she was twenty-three, but age was the least pernicious of the differences between them. They continued to make hurried, heartless siesta love in the evangelical shade of the orange trees. The madwomen encouraged them from the terraces with indecent songs, and celebrated their triumphs with stadium ovations. Before the Marquis was aware of the dangers that pursued him, Bernarda woke him from his stupor with the news that she was in the second month of pregnancy. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The ancient priest who had taken Father Angel's place and whose name no one had bothered to find out awaited God's mercy stretched out casually in a hammock, tortured by arthritis and the insomnia of doubt while the lizards and rats fought over the inheritance of the nearby church. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Morality, too, is a question of time. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She would say, Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out. — 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

The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It's much more important to write than to be written about. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Many displayed in their nudity traces of their past: scars of knife thrusts in the belly, starbursts of guns hot wounds, ridges of the razor cuts of love, Caesarean sections sewn up by butchers. Some of them had their young children with them during the day, those unfortunate fruits of youthful defiance or carelessness, and they took off their children's clothes as soon as they were brought in so they would not feel different in that paradise of nudity. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you don't fear God, fear him through the metals. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He finished shaving by touch, still walking around the room, for he tried to see himself in the mirror as little as possible so he would not have to look into his own eyes. — 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

Later, given political changes and the deterioration of the world, nobody in the government thought about either arts or letters. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The past was a lie, memory has no return, every spring gone by could never be recovered, and the wildest and most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Most of the times it's healthier to start over in a different way, or throw it away. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Those who do not sing cannot even imagine the joy of singing. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

The symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He is ugly and sad ... but he is all love.
Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Thing in good marriage is not happiness but stabilty . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[F]or fate granted him the immense good fortune of losing his memory. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alteration between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was farcical. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago. — Helen Oyeyemi

Shame has poor memory. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Her copy of the photograph had been lost, and Hildebranda's was almost invisible, but they could both recognize themselves through the mists of disenchantment: young and beautiful as they would never be again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people ... — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

HE had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions a arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dung hill of war, the more the was resembled Amarant. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They pawned, between sobs, the last glittering ornaments of their last paradise. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The unluckiest of the Caribbean's sick came, in search of cures: a poor woman who, since childhood, had been counting the beats of her heart so long that she had run out of numbers to count; a Jamaican who, because of the tormenting sound the stars made, never slept; a sleepwalker who rose from bed at night, and in sleep undid all the things he had done in waking; and many other ailments too, less serious in nature. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one's life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone. — 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

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

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

God was a full-fledged member of the Conservative Party. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her: I give you my life in this rose. — 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

No one understood why she had not died of hunger until the Indians, who were aware of everything, for they went ceaselessly about the house on their stealthy feet, discovered that Rebeca only liked to eat the damp earth of the courtyard and the cake of the whitewash that she picked off the walls with her nails. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fatality makes us invisible. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

it was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when one could do nothing, but contemplate the rain — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

That woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Si vas a volverte loco, vuelve te solo — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she become to men. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No medicine cures what happiness cannot. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death ... — 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

Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was simply a way of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The scalpel is the greatest proof of the failure of medicine. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His place was always set at the table, in case he rturned from the dead without warning . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is."
Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile.
"That you would be good in a war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. — 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 was on the verge of ruin but well-compensated by the miracle of still being alive at my age. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The eternal loves of the high seas ended when the port came in sight. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Life will be too short for people to tell about it. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia 122 — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. "Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Let me be, he said. Despair is the health of the damned. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite. — 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

Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez