Macondo Well Quotes & Sayings

Marquez was not born in Colombia.
He was born in Macondo,
And his Macondo is his La Mancha. — Dejan Stojanovic

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. A — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Miseries of a birth. — Roland Barthes

My mind is a dangerous place to be alone without supervision. — Caroline Burau

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative. — Edmund White

Everyone will have gone then except us, because we're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs' horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they'll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn't passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No' ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people ... The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive ... They have to accept it. — Chaim Weizmann

When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection. — A.W. Tozer

Conchpore is real. It is as real as Malgudi, Brahmpur, Lilliput or Macondo. And also as real as San Francisco, Madurai, Edinburgh, Gaborone or Tokyo. You know that fictional towns exist. You visit them all the time. — Indu Muralidharan

Since all living beings are bound by their craving for existence, you must begin by finding the determination to be free. — Je Tsongkhapa

Go away, G. I'm wooing. — Elle Kennedy

Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use ... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists". — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of goals you are setting for yourself today. — Meg Jay

I could live very quietly, do advertising to earn money. — Carine Roitfeld

Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. — Ursula K. Le Guin

My main interest is just to work with people who have beautiful, interesting, emotive voices; I'm not too concerned whether someone is famous. — Moby

I have to take care of the house, and the dogs, and the Macondo Board meetings, all those e-mails, the letters that are going to fans. And you've got to pay bills. These things eat up your time. You have to prepare and pack to go on that trip. Then when you come back you have to file all that stuff, answer all that mail, and that's not even washing the clothes or any of that. So it takes as many days as I've been away to come back to normal and to get quiet. — Sandra Cisneros

I only wake to fall asleep
And sleep, to awake without end. — Konstantin Batyushkov

Tired of that hermeneutical delirium, the workers turned away from the authorities in Macondo and brought their complaints up to the higher courts. It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis. So that the fable of the Virginia ham was nonsense, the same as that of the miraculous pills and the Yuletide toilets, and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me. — Sandra Cisneros

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins. — Salman Rushdie

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

In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground. — Charles Dickens

Everybody can use more love. Do not take offense if people are rude or unkind or seem like they are trying to hurt your feelings. You cannot know what is happening with them. Send them love no matter how they act. It will come back to you many times over as increased love in your life. — Orin

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