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

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.

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.

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

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.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.