Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

It's much more important to write than to be written about.

What does he say?' he asked. 'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.' 'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.