An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.