Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Quotes from book
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
Original title
Cien años de soledad
(Spanish, 1967)
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia.
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Nobel lecture (8 December 1982) http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_nobel.html
Variant: races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Context: The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
“The first of the
line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
Chapter 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=pgPWOaOctq8C&q=%22The+secret+of+a+good+old+age+is+simply+an+honorable+pact+with+solitude%22&pg=PA199#v=onepage
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 119
Context: 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.
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
Variant: A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 241, said by Colonel Aureliano Buendía
“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 104, Referring to Arcadio
Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 148, referring to Aureliano José
