Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

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.

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

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

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.