Great Throughts Treasury

"When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality."

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."

"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."

"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."

"If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already"

"All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret."

"Always tell what you feel. Do what you think."

"I never forgot her somber look as we were eating: Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn’t how you old you are but how old you feel."

"A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old."

"A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain."

"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.""

"A good writer is best seen so broken that what you post."

"A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like."

"A gallery of wooden rooms where women lived alone, and the smell of dead flowers."

"A friend is the person that holds your hand and touches your heart!"

"A man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help him up."

"A liberal president did not seem either more nor less than a conservative president, only worse dress."

"A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it."

"A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father."

"A mother discovers with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."

"A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons."

"A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

"A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by."

"A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart."

"A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread."

"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can."

"a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed."

"A woman is like good literature: to all but incomprehensible to the stupid."

"After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip."

"Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone."

"After searching for it uselessly in the taste of the earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms."

"Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments."

"Age isn't how you old you are but how old you feel."

"Although different had been their lives had they known in time that he is easier to circumvent the large conjugal disasters that the tiny miseries of all days."

"All that was needed was a shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera"

"All is master of his death, and the only thing that can be done when the time comes is to help him to death without fear or pain."

"Always remember that the most important of a good marriage does not is happiness but stability."

"Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones."

"Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained."

"Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end."

"Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was."

"An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path."

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

"America is half a world gone mad."

"An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband."

"And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were."

"An old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end."

"And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only every day and eternal reality was love."

"And attributed to mankind an instinct of reproduction, was attributed to a more defined and compelling, it was the instinct to kill cockroaches, and that if they had managed to escape the human ferocity was because they had taken refuge in the darkness, where became invulnerable congenital fear of the dark man, but instead he became susceptible to the splendor of noon, so that already in the Middle Ages, today and forever and ever, the only effective method to kill cockroaches was solar glare."