Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

Invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny.

Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.