Marquez Death Quotes & Sayings

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The air was so damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning Ursula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end in a placid swoon and she had already asked them to take her to Father Antonio Isabel, when Santa Sofia de la Piedad discovered that her back was paved with leeches. She took them off one by one, crushing them with a firebrand before they bled her to death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Old age began with one's 1st fall and the death came with the 2nd . — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change in position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We have still not had a death. A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground." he said.
"If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die" replied Ursula with a soft firmness. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Along the rough cobbled streets that had served so well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at two o'clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed interminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one's soul. And — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

T nightfall, at
the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose
out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred
the certainty of death in the depths of one's soul. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Be calm. God awaits you at the door. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There had never been a death so foretold. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He knew that she was to have an elaborate wedding, and the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, which until that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedience to a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social adornment, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one's, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her orange blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil covering the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was consummated, however, he repented of his own wickedness, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagine the world without her. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fernanda was scandalized that she did not understand the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium of funeral conventions. — 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

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

You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it ... I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Each grape she pulled off grew back again on the cluster. In the dream it was evident that the girl had spent many years at that infinite window trying to finish the cluster, and was in no hurry to so because she knew that in the last grape lay death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The pursuit of love is like falconry.- chronicle of death foretold — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If I died now," he said, "you would hardly remember me when you are my age."
He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the cool shadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake, but the boy did not see them. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is life, more than death, that has no limits. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The only thing that comes for sure is death, colonel — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He thought the column was magnificent, everything it said about old age was the best he had ever read, and it made no sense to end it with a decision that seemed more like a civil death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I tell myself now, that ever since I was little my sense of social decency has been more developed than my sense of death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had love him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. (Love in the Time of Cholera) — 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

Death has no sense of the ridiculous, — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

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

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

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

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Trying to provoke him into a terrifying sentence, I said: The only definitive thing is death. Yes, he said, but it isn't easy to get there when one's condition is as good as yours. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The brothers were brought up to be men. The girls had been reared to get married. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, 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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones ... After all, there are better ways to starve to death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of
other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price. Wouldn't you have done the same in my place?"
General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. "Probably," he said. "But what
worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on
the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on "is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness." He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.
"At this rate," he concluded, "you'll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you'll shoot
my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is life, more than death, which has no limits — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

fear of death is the amber of happiness — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. — 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 had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dung heap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez