Great Throughts Treasury

"The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it."

"The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness."

"The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass."

"The world isn't what it once was because there aren't many men like you left."

"The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

"The weak would never enter the kingdom of love."

"The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not."

"The woman stayed on her stool, silent, concentrating, watching the man's movements with an air of declining sadness. Watching him as a lamp about to go out might have looked at a man."

"The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to name them was to bring them the finger."

"The worst of the bad situation that compels one to tell lies."

"The world will finish, then said, fuck the day when men travel first class and literature in the freight car."

"The year 2005 was the first in my life when I did not write a single line."

"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."

"The world advances. Yes, I said, advancing, but wandered around the sun."

"Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn't be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small."

"The worst way to miss someone is to be sitting next to you and know that you can never have."

"Then I had just turned 20, was recently widowed and wealthy, was dazzled by the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte, had made ??a Mason, memory recited aloud your favorite pages of Emile and La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau, who had been his favorite books for a long time, and had traveled on foot, by the hand of his master and his knapsack on his back through most of Europe."

"Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it."

"Then he knew that they had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm."

"Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits."

"Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation."

"Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear."

"Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath, and when there was no more hay or corn or roots, she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets, the Persian rugs, the plush bedspreads, the velvet drapes, and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed."

"There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age."

"There are moments in life when you miss someone so much that you want to kill him out of your dreams and hug you in the real world"

"Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders."

"There had never been a death so foretold."

"There is a fear always sweet to me that the plane will fall."

"There is always something left to love."

"There are no two men in this world more similar than you and him, she told me. And that's the worst thing for having a conversation."

"There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart"

"There is great power in the irresistible force of love."

"There was no correspondence between what I was reading and what was out on the street. The minute I'd go down to the corner for a cup of coffee, I'd find a world that was completely different. When I was forced to leave for the Coast by the circumstances of April 9, it was a total discovery: that there could be a correspondence between what I was reading and what I was living and had always lived"

"There is no medicine to cure not cure what is not happiness."

"There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck."

"There is no greater glory than to die for love."

"There was no mystery at the heart of a Buendia that was impenetrable for her because a century of cards and experience had taught him that family history was an irreparable repetitions gear, a spinning wheel spinning would have followed up eternity, had it not been for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle."

"There was no secret under the sun for the drivers on Paseo Colón."

"There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was."

"They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there."

"There's no greater misfortune than dying alone."

"They came from celebrate their golden wedding and does knew live a single instant one without the other or without thinking one to another."

"They did not speak of it the first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake."

"They entrenched themselves in their preferences, their beliefs, their prejudices, and closed ranks against everything that was different"

"They enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs."

"They had lived together long enough to realize that love was love at anytime and anywhere, but the more dense the closer to death."

"They fly around there, like the angels. '"

"They felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."

"They kept a clean and neat house. Rebeca would open it wide at dawn and the wind from the graveyard would come in through the windows and go out through the doors to the yard and leave the whitewashed walls and furniture tanned by the saltpeter of the dead."

"They had to isolate her so that she would not drive the rest of the madwomen crazy."