Colombian author Quotes

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

“If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.”

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”

“I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.”

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”

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

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

“When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead. "Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy.”

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

“It was a love of perpetual flight.”

“The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”

“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...”

“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.”

“Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.”

“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.”

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

“Children's lies are signs of great talent.”

“No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.”

“...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.”

“Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.”

“In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.”

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

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

“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.”

“He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”