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

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.

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

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.

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.

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.