Great Throughts Treasury

"Morale is a matter of time."

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

"My God, if I had a piece of life... I wouldn't let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them. I would convince each woman and each man that they are my favorites, and I would live in love with love."

"My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show."

"Morality, too, is a question of time."

"Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but... none was as specific as old age."

"My literary background was basically in poetry, but bad poetry, since only through bad poetry can you get to good poetry."

"My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house."

"My unhealthy timidity might be a great obstacle to me in my life."

"My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic."

"Necessity has the face of a dog."

"My vocabulary isn't very good. I have to keep looking up words in the dictionary."

"Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile."

"Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such a clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing."

"Never take your time with someone who is ready to spend time with you, Ngzran."

"No crazy is crazy if you are satisfied with your reasons."

"No man is worth your tears, and the one who is won't make you cry."

"No matter what the doctors say, rabies in humans is often a delayed trap of the enemy."

"No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever."

"Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just"

"No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. No, not rich, he said. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."

"No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had."

"No person deserves your tears. And whoever will not make you deserve to mourn."

"No sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better."

"No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."

"No, Mr. Karmichael I do not need a gold spittoon to expectorate blood widow Montiel."

"No: that fear had been inside him for many years, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over his own shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality."

"Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away the bad memories and magnified the good ones. No one was safe from its onslaught."

"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."

"Nobody teaches life anything."

"Not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear, and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude."

"Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination."

"Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love."

"Nothing is so like a person and the way of death."

"Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies, and no death could resemble the man he was thinking about less than this one. But it was he, although it seemed absurd: the oldest and best qualified doctor in the city, and one of its illustrious men for many other meritorious reasons, had died of a broken spine, at the age of eighty-one, when he fell from the branch of A Mango Tree as he tried to catch A Parrot."

"Nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

"Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies."

"Nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love."

"Nothing was eaten in the house that was not seasoned in the broth of longing."

"Now you don't have to say yes because your heart is saying it for you."

"O became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love."

"Old age began with one's first fall and the death came with the second."

"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 possibility. 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."

"Old people, with other old people, are not so old."

"Oliara the great man and an excellent soldier and friend, but record everything and there is nothing more dangerous than Memories Blog"

"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream."

"On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girlfriends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart."

"On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn."

"Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle."

"Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that 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."