Great Throughts Treasury

"One ages more and with more intensity in pictures than in reality."

"One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them."

"One day the father Nicanor came to see him in his chestnut with a checkerboard and a box of chips for the invite to play checkers with him, Jose Arcadio Buendia was unwilling to accept because, he said, he never was unable to understand what sense could take a fight between two opponents agree on the same principles."

"One could be happy not only without love, but despite it."

"One does not die when he should die, but when he can."

"One evening, when everyone napped, resisting no more and went to his bedroom. She found him in his underwear, awake, lying in the hammock he had colgadio of the pitchforks with boats mooring cables. The impression on his huge nudity he felt the urge to go back. Pedone excused himself. I did not know you were here. But I turn off the voice not to wake anyone. Come here, he said. Rebecca obeyed. He stopped beside the hammock, sweating ice, feeling his guts from a ban knots while José Arcadio stroked her ankles with the fingertips, and then the calves and then the thighs, murmuring: Oh, sister; ay, sis She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her by the waist and the dispossession of their intimacy with three claws, and quartered as a bird. He managed to give thanks to God for being born, before losing consciousness in the inconceivable pleasure of that pain unsupportable, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed as a blotter the explosion of his blood."

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

"One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway."

"One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature."

"One never quite stops believing, said the Marquis. Some doubt remains forever. Abrenuncio understood. He had always thought that ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget."

"One night was smeared from head to foot with peaches in syrup, like dogs licked and loved like crazy on the floor of the corridor, and were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were preparing to devour alive"

"One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect… When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories."

"One of the best side effects of the boom in Latin American writing is that publishers are always on the lookout to make sure that they're not going to miss the new Cortázar. Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work."

"Only God knows how much I love you."

"One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be."

"Only then I realized that neighbors seat on airplanes, like old married couples, not given good morning to wake up. Nor it."

"Opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through."

"Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem, and a Serrat song would be the serenade I'd offer to the moon. With my tears I would water roses, to feel the pain of their thorns, and the red kiss of their petals..."

"Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures."

"Our code of ethics supposes that we doctors are made of wood."

"People always want to cry, the only thing that I do, is that I provide them the excuse."

"Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

"People do not die when the time comes, you can die will die."

"People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want."

"People have three lives: the public life, the private life and the secret life."

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

"Resigned heard gout, thick, heavy, perfect, which struck in the other world, the world of the absurd and misguided rational animals."

"Reverend master at that time was getting senile. It will continue to grow, and after years of dementia pastor, God, the devil, and heedless of revolt resulted in victory, perhaps hiding his true identity to deceive the contents, the heavens floor of the throne sat the devil would take forward."

"Rich no, he said, I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing."

"Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him."

"People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'"

"Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself."

"Recalling these things while enlisting the trunk of José Arcadio, Ursula wondered if it was better to lie than once in the grave and that the earth cast on him and asked God, without fear, if you really believed that people iron was made ??to endure many pains and mortifications, and asking and asking was poking his own confusion, and felt loose some irrepressible desire to rant like an outsider, and finally afford a moment of rebellion, the moment so many times longed and so often get deferred resignation by the foundation and shit once in all, and the infinite heart removed lots of bad words he had to choke in a century of conformity."

"Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

"Remember that everything that is good, whatever its origin, comes from the Holy Spirit."

"Referring to Amaranta"

"Seeing him so, suit for her in a way so obvious, could not prevent the redness of fire that mounted to the face. Dimmed when greeted him, and he became clouded more with your vision blur. The consciousness of them behave as boyfriends blurred even more, and the consciousness that we both ended up offuscarli were blurred to the point that the captain Samaritan noticed a flicker of compassion."

"Security, order, happiness is what numbers can combine with each other to turn directly to something like love: love approx. But it's not love!"

"Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion."

"Science has eliminated distance, Melquíades proclaimed. In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house."

"Shame you have poor memory."

"Sex is the consolation that one to turn to when they do not get the love."

"She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as three times a week."

"She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service."

"Sex is one's consolation when love is not enough."

"Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."

"She always stood a barrier of anger for not to show fear. And in that case, the most terrible of all, it was the fear of running out of it."

"She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity."

"She asked him if it was true these days, as they said songs, that love could do anything. True, he replied, but do not believe it either."

"She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street."