Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

Necessity has the face of a dog.

The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.

Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.

She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .

More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.

Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.

Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.

She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.

I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.

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.

Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

I’ve remained a virgin for you.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

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.

I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

Fame invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world.

She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.

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

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.

The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

It's much more important to write than to be written about.

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.

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.

Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.

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.

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.