In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.