A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

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.

Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.