Gabriel Garcia Marquez quotes:

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  • Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

  • But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

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

  • Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

  • It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

  • An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

  • Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

  • The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

  • Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.

  • What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

  • She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

  • It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

  • I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.

  • No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

  • A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

  • Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

  • 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.'

  • [The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

  • Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry

  • People spend a lifetime thinking abouthow 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.'

  • Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

  • There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart

  • A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

  • Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

  • I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

  • 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.

  • Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

  • The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.

  • 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.

  • I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

  • She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

  • 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.

  • There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

  • Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.

  • A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.

  • Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.

  • Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.

  • 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.

  • An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.

  • 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.

  • Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

  • It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.

  • I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

  • I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Only God knows how much I love you.

  • He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

  • The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

  • I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.

  • Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

  • Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

  • ...and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

  • He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

  • Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

  • 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.

  • More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.

  • 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.

  • In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.

  • Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

  • 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.

  • Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

  • The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

  • When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

  • This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

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

  • But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

  • and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

  • If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.

  • For those who may be hurting over lost love: Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened.

  • 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.

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

  • A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart

  • When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.

  • He was weary of the uncertainty of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.

  • The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.

  • Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

  • The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.

  • She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.

  • Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

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

  • Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.

  • He who awaits much can expect little.

  • I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

  • The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.

  • In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.

  • ...The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

  • ...they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

  • ...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...

  • A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.

  • A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

  • A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

  • A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

  • A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

  • a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.

  • A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

  • Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

  • Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

  • All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

  • All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

  • 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.

  • Always tell what you feel. Do what you think...

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

  • And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.

  • and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love...

  • and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

  • And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.

  • and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

  • and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.

  • As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.

  • As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

  • At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

  • Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother's experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: "What does it feel like?" José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: "It's like an earthquake.

  • Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

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