Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

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.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end

The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.