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
Love in the Time of Cholera |
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano
Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father
took him to discover ice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, opening
words |
At that time Macondo was a village of twenty
adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that
ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous,
like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things
lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary
to point.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
They felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy
gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies,
considering that they already had too many troubles of their
own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
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 alternation between excitement and disappointment,
doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for
certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate
stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José
Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all
through the house even in broad daylight.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
|
A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel
Aureliano Buendia |
The only difference today between Liberals
and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock
and the Conservatives at eight.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
The world must be all fucked up when men travel
first class and literature goes as freight.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin,
had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary
leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano
José had been destined to find with her the happiness
that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to
die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his
back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation
of the cards.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude |
He [Aureliano II ] had already understood that
he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the
city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind
and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when
Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments,
and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time
immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one
hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity
on earth.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude, last words |