Gabriel García Márquez Quotes (218 quotes)

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Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Gabriel García Márquez

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez: 218 quotes52 likes

Famous Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
Variant: Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

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

Gabriel García Márquez

[The Autumn of the Patriarch, 2006 [1976], HarperCollins, 978-0-06-088286-0, 254] translated from El Ontoño del Patriarica (1975) by Gregory Rabassa

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

Gabriel García Márquez

Variant: Friend is the person that holds your hand and touches your heart!

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes about love

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Variant: Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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

Gabriel García Márquez

“There is always something left to love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes about life

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book The General in His Labyrinth

Source: The General in His Labyrinth

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Source: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel García Márquez: Trending quotes

“A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 153

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book No One Writes to the Colonel

Source: El coronel no tiene quien le escriba

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Variant: .. 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
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“Do not allow me to forget you”

Gabriel García Márquez book Of Love and Other Demons

Source: Of Love and Other Demons

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 1

“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”

Gabriel García Márquez book The General in His Labyrinth

Source: The General in His Labyrinth

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 322
Context: 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. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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..”

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Only God knows how much I love you.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Of Love and Other Demons

Source: Of Love and Other Demons

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Cease, cows, life is short.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Variant: There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.
Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. 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. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

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

Gabriel García Márquez

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

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera