Gabriel García Márquez: Herring

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”

“They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.”

“The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”

“he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.”

“Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.”

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”

“Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart.”