What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.

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

The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.