Great Throughts Treasury

"She began to study with a teacher of teachers, whom they brought for that purpose from the city of Mompox, and who died unexpectedly two weeks later, and she continued for several years with the best musician at the seminary, whose gravedigger’s breath distorted her arpeggios."

"She begged God to grant him at least one time so that it does not should go without knowing how much she had loved beyond their doubts both and felt an overwhelming desire to start a new life with him from the beginning so that they could say what they formerly had perhaps done wrong."

"She discovered 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."

"She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude."

"She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her husband for having left her alone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his pajamas under the pillow, his slippers that had always looked to her like an invalid’s, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten to tell him. At every moment countless ordinary questions would come to mind that he alone could answer for her. 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."

"She believed that whatever happened to one love affected other loves throughout the world."

"She felt the abyss of disenchantment."

"She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love."

"She had discovered little by little uncertainty footsteps of her husband, the disturbances of mood, the cracks of memory, the recent habit of sobbing in his sleep, but he had not considered the final unequivocal signs of rust, but a return happy childhood. Why did not treat him like an old senile difficult but as a child, and that deception was providential for both having them rescued from compassion."

"She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violin played for her alone."

"She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a cyclonic power, amazingly set up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three kicks, and butchered her like a bird. Gotta give thanks to God for having been born before losing consciousness in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming lake network which absorbed as a blotter to burst your blood."

"She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake."

"She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love."

"She learned to... what I had experienced many times before without knowing it: you can be in love with several people at once, and all with the same pain, without betraying any."

"She lay on her back in bed for a long time thinking and when she returned to school an hour early she was beyond all desire to cry and she had sharpened her sense of smell along with her claws so that she could track down the miserable whore who had ruined her life."

"She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man."

"She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart."

"She no longer thought of him as the groom but not sure as to the husband to whom she was whole."

"She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter"

"She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written."

"She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had."

"She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it."

"She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is inclement and petty kingdom, and that women give themselves as men of character as they communicate their security they need as to face life."

"She returned many years later. So much time had passed that the smell of musk in the room had blended in with the smell of the dust, with the dry and tiny breath of the insects. I was alone in the house, sitting in the corner, waiting. And I had learned to make out the sound of rotting wood, the flutter of the air becoming old in the closed bedrooms. That was when she came."

"She taught him all he had to learn to love life that does not teach anyone."

"She took refuge in her newborn son. she had felt him leave her body with a sensation of relief at freeing herself from something that did not belong to her and she had been horrified at herself when she confirmed that she did not feel the slightest affection for that calf from her womb the midwife showed her in the raw, smeared with grease and blood and with the umbilical cord rolled around his neck. But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered 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."

"She took the time to just say the name. He searched in the darkness, found at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the next, and pinned him to the wall with his unerring dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence was written ever since."

"She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity."

"She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind."

"She was certain that the Vicario brothers were not as eager to carry out the sentence as to find someone who would do them the favor of stopping them."

"She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know."

"She was the only person in the house, of either sex, who did not seem to have a heart pierced by the sorrow of thwarted love."

"She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory."

"She would get up at eleven o'clock, completely nude, in the bathroom, killing scorpions as she came out of her dense and prolonged sleep."

"She would say, Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out."

"She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best."

"Shit! she shouted. Amaranta, who was starting to put the clothes into the trunk, thought that she had been bitten by a scorpion. Where is it? she asked in alarm. What? The bug! Amaranta said. Úrsula put a finger on her heart. Here, she said."

"Shooting with his camera the animals tha they did not allow him to kill with his rifle."

"Since then the parish priest manifested the first symptoms of senile delusions that led him to say, years later, that the devil had probably won the rebellion against God, and it was the one who was seated on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity to catch the unwary."

"Since Aureliano at threat time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up in a federal system that would take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were no prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities."

"Shortly before the end, with a flash of joy, soon realized that he had never been so close to someone he loved so much."

"Sometimes you meet him not as a ghost than alive, which really was missing. Encouraged the certainty that he was there, still alive, but without the male's whims without his patriarchal requirements without the need for exhaustive loves him the same ritual of outdate kisses and tender words with which he loved her. Why then understood him better than when he was alive, he understands the agony of his love, the rush to find in that security that seemed to have been the mainstay of public life and in fact it never had. One day, in the greatest despair, she had shouted: Do not you see how unhappy I am. He was off his glasses, with a very own motion, without upset, filled with the transparent waters of children's eyes and with a single sentence threw the full weight of unbearable wisdom: Always remember that the most important in a marriage is not happiness, but stability."

"So for now wave good-bye leave your hands held high."

"Stop Senator uninterrupted breath and said with astonishment: Damn. God do more crazy stuff."

"Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life."

"So his insouciance consents would be suicidal."

"Soon the woman died of natural causes and not share the fate of the other, whose sliced ??corpse was enriched in her vegetable garden, and was buried in the local cemetery in one piece and with a Dutch name."

"Taught him the only thing he has to learn about love, and it is that no one can teach others life."

"Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no."

"Tell him, the colonel said, smiling, that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can."