Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever".

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.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

He is ugly and sad, but he is all love.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.

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.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country.

Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.

She was lost in her longing to understand.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.

Children's lies are signs of great talent.

This soup tastes like windows

She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

We'll grow old waiting.

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

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.

Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

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.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them.

Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.

One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.

The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.