Colombian author Quotes

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

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

“It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.”

“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.”

“There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.”

“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.”

“Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”

“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.”

“One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.”

“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.”

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

“Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”

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

“She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .”

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

“If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.”

“Jealousy knows more than truth does.”

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”

“Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.”

“Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.”

“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.”

“If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.”

“I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.”