She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.

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 woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.

It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.

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

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.