Gabriel García Márquez: Quotes about time

Gabriel García Márquez was Colombian writer. Explore interesting quotes on time.
Gabriel García Márquez: 436 quotes52 likes

“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

“… 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

“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

“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

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

Gabriel García Márquez book The General in His Labyrinth

Source: The General in His Labyrinth

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”

Gabriel García Márquez

“He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 148, referring to Aureliano José

“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)

“… 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)

“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

“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