Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

What does he say?' he asked. 'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.' 'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

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

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

There had never been a death so foretold.

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.

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.

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.

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

Necessity has the face of a dog.

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

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.

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.

You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.

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

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

Jealousy knows more than truth does.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

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

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

Taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.

She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.

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.

...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.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

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

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.

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

El mundo habrá acabado de joderse -dijo entonces- el día en que los hombres viajen en primera clase y la literatura en el vagón de carga.

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

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.

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.

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.

He governed as if he felt predestined to never die

The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don't understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

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

Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.