Best quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.

It was a love of perpetual flight.

The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.

And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love.

Fatality makes us invisible.

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.

Necessity has the face of a dog.

Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

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.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.

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.

Cease, cows, life is short.

For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.

It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.

It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.

He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.

The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.

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.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

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

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

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

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.

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

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.

He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.

She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.

Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.

Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,’ he said. ‘That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.

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

I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.

Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.

Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.

Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?

I want the same one, the way she always is, without failures, without fights, without bad memories.

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.

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

Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.

The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.

Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.