Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez Quotes

Enjoy the top 653 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez.

“From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at twenty, a parlor whore at forty, the queen of Babylon at seventy, a saint at one hundred.”
— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez —

“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.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

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

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

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

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“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.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“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.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, 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.”

— 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

“She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst ... 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. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“There is great power in the irresistible force of love.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Children inherit their parents' madness.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people.

— 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

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

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“From that time on the parish priest began to show signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“The woman stayed on her stool, silent, concentrating, watching the man's movements with an air of declining sadness. Watching him as a lamp about to go out might have looked at a man.”

— 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

“He was surprised to discover that when rich people were starving they looked so much like the poor”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Here the only one who has the right to prohibit anything is the government, we live in a democracy.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Gabito isn't deceiving anyone," she said with an innocent smile, "but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seem to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine business letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Those who do not sing cannot even imagine the joy of singing.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control.
"The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books," he would say.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”

— 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

“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?' he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
'Forever,' he said.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Thank God I found my Chinaman in time. It's like being married to your little finger, but he's all mine.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“Let me soap you," he murmured.
"Thank you for your good intentions," she said, "but my two hands are quite enough."
"Even if it's just your back," the foreigner begged.
"That would be silly," she said. "People never soap their backs.”

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

The pursuit of love is like falconry.- chronicle of death foretold

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

Into your hands at last I have come vanquished." She obeyed. "Where I know that I must die,

— Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez

“On Juan Rulfo:
His published writings add up to no more than 300 pages, but they are just as many, and I believe just as enduring, as those that we know of Sophocles.”