Quotes from book

One Hundred Years of Solitude

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

“… time was not passing… it was turning in a circle…”

“More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”

“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.”

“Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”

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

“There is always something left to love.”

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”

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

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

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

“An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.”

“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.”

“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”

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

“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.”

“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.”