Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”

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

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

“A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”

“A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart”

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

“There is always something left to love.”

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”

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

“his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.”

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but… life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

“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.”

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

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”

“Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.”

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

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”

“You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.”

“I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.”

“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.”

“The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”

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

“Do not allow me to forget you”

“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.”

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”

“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”

“Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

“Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”

“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.”

“… time was not passing… it was turning in a circle…”

“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.”

“He is ugly and sad… but he is all love.”

“She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”

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

“and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love…”

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..”

“Be calm. God awaits you at the door.”

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

“What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”

“Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.”

“Only God knows how much I love you.”

“She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.”

“Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”

“She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love.”

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

“Cease, cows, life is short.”

“Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.”

“Always tell what you feel. Do what you think…”

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

“Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.”

“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.”

“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”

“There is no greater glory than to die for love.”

“One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.”

“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

“and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.”

“She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.”

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