Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

I’ve remained a virgin for you.

Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.