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.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

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.

She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.