Gabriel García Márquez: Trending quotes (page 11)

“I couldn't tell you because even I don't know who I am yet.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

“… nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Love

“Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past…”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Memory , Past , Future

“In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 322

Books , Problem , Thinking , Solitude

“From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Life , Death , Fear , Water

“I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 339

Life , Problem , Thinking , Daughters

“… the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Last Paragraph
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Men , Solitude , Memory , Time

“In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 404

Love , Bird , Solitude , Sleep

“There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him," she told me. "And that's the worst thing for having a conversation.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Men , World

“Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), trans. Gregory Rabassa [Ballantine, 1984, ISBN 0-345-31002-0], p. 47

Death , Flowers

“… for an instant I thought about stopping the cab to say goodbye, but I preferred not to defy again a destiny as uncertain and persistent as mine.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

“A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage to fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you're famous for twenty-four hours a day, and you can't say, "Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow," or press a button and say, "I won't be famous here or now."”

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 337

Death , Books , Business , Problem

“Because for you, quitting smoking would be like killing someone you love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Love

“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Nostalgia , Memory

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friend a person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died."”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 166

People , Imagination , Lying , Solitude

“Children's lies are signs of great talent.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Children

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 336

Books , Country

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119

Nostalgia , Fear , Time , Making love