Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

He is ugly and sad, but he is all love.

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

If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

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.

When I sit down to write, which is the essential moment in my life, I am completely alone. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It's a little embarrassing - like being seen in your underwear It's like the way magicians never tell others how they make a dove come out of a hat.

In the end all books are written for your friends.

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

Shame has poor memory.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

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.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

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.

Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

Hate and love are reciprocal passions.

Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.

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.

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

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.

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

Old people, with other old people, are not so old.

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

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

Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

He who awaits much can expect little.

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

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

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.

he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.

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.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

I want the same one, the way she always is, without failures, without fights, without bad memories.

[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.

The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.

Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.

Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

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.'

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

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

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

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.

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

He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.

Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.