Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Shame has poor memory.”

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

“In the end all books are written for your friends.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.”

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

“The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.”

“He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”

“For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”

“wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”