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.

In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

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

Do not allow me to forget you

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

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.