Great Throughts Treasury

"It's the devil, my father, he said Delaura. The most terrible of all."

"It's true, he said, but you'd better not believe it."

"It's wrong to take into the utility room a rowboat does not serve for anything - said the father. But it's worse than wanting to also have diving equipment."

"It's not that the book is coded, what's coded is the events that serve as its foundation, just as some of the events in One Hundred Years of Solitude are. The rest is experiences I've had. When my mother reads the book she's wonderful, because she goes through it saying, “This is such-and-such, this is that, that's my buddy, the one people said was queer but really wasn't."

"It's war. And I again say Aurelito, which is Colonel Aureliano Buendía."

"It's ugly and gloomy, but it exudes love."

"I've a great deal of affection for Leaf Storm. Even lots of compassion for that guy who wrote it. I can see him perfectly. A 22- or 23-year-old kid who feels he's not going to write anything else in life, feels it's his only chance, and he tries to throw in everything he remembers, everything he's learned about literary technique and sophistication from every author he's seen. At that time I was catching up, I was into the English and North American novelists. And when the critics start finding my influences in Faulkner and Hemingway, what they find—it's not that they're not right, but in some other way—is that when I'm confronted with that whole reality on the Coast, and I start connecting with my experiences literarily . . . the best way to tell it, I realize, isn't Kafka's."

"I've always been convinced that my true profession is that of journalist."

"I've got a photography book that I'm going to show you. I've said on various occasions that in the genesis of all my books there's always an image."

"I've learned that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain without realizing that true happiness lies on the descent."

"Jealousy did not know his house: in more than thirty years of marital peace, Dr. Urbino had often boasted in public, and until then it was sure, to be like the Swedish matches, which only turns on their box."

"I've said that anyone who doesn't contradict himself is a dogmatist, and every dogmatist is a reactionary."

"Jealousy and knows more of the truth. A man finds solace in sex when he is not lucky in love. A woman never forgives the man who remains indifferent to its charms."

"Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened."

"Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned."

"Jealousy knows more than truth does."

"Just as real memories are forgotten, also some that were never in the memories can be like they were."

"Justice limps along, but gets there all the same."

"Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being."

"La memory of the heart eliminates bad memories and magnifies the good, and that thanks to that contraption we managed cope the past."

"Languages ??have to know them when you go to sell something. But when you're shopping, everyone understands him whatever."

"Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude."

"Let me stay here, he said. There was soap."

"Leaf Storm was written for my friends who were helping me and lending me their books and were very enthusiastic about my work. In general I think you usually do write for someone."

"Let's forget about each other forever, she told him. We're too old for this sort of thing now."

"Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one."

"Life is not what one lived, but rather what one remembers, and how it is remembered to tell the tale."

"Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown."

"Life had given him every reason to be alert, but none to be frightened."

"Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

"Life was ... Nothing more than A System of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with Which People entertained Each other ... The Dominant sign in That Paradise of Provincial frivolity was the Fear of the Unknown."

"Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said Macondo and another larger one on the main street that said God exists."

"Literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people."

"Look after Rsya Flvrntynv threw it Napzyrsh power failure, the love of her brave. Eventually came to the conclusion that this is life eternal, that is, no deaths."

"Life... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other... The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was the fear of the unknown."

"Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too."

"Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity."

"Love is an unnatural feeling that binds two strangers in a miserable and unhealthy relationship, the stronger, the more ephemeral"

"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.""

"Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."

"Love was always love, anytime, anyplace: but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

"Love, if there was, was a thing apart: another life."

"Love of the soul from the waist up and love the body from the waist down."

"Many things must be manufactured and sold for the rich before they die. They all patients about to die."

"Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future."

"Macondo This word had caught my attention since the first trips with my grandfather, but adult only discovered I liked his poetic resonance."

"Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was a village of 20 houses of mud and cañabrava built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention had to bring them the finger."

"Melquiades was in death, but returned because they could not bear solitude."

"Maybe God wants you to meet many wrong people before meeting the right, so when it happens, be thankful."

"Men are not born the day when the mother brings them to the world, but when life forces them to bring themselves"