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

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

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.

She was lost in her longing to understand.

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

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.

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