Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

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“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

“Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.”

“Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”

“Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”

“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”

“The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.”

“The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.”

“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.”

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

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”

“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”

“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.”

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

“It was a love of perpetual flight.”

“Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.”

“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.”

“and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.”

“If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.”

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

“This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.”

“No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

“I’ve remained a virgin for you.”

“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”

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

“To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.”

“Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.”

“I'll never fall in love again… it's like having two souls at the same time.”

“My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.”

“For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“… The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.”

“For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

“When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.”

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”

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

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”

“It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.”

“Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams…”

“For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

“He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”

“Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

“She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”

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

“The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.”

“I go to seek a great perhaps”