Gabriel García Márquez: Likeness

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.”

“This soup tastes like windows”

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

“The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.”

“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.”

“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."”

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

“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.”