Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

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

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. Florentino Ariza, Love in the Time of Cholera

Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.