Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Gabriel García Márquez, aka Gabo

Colombian Author, Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Screenwriter and Journalist, Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature

"They looked like two children, she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything."

"They no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

"They say I'm a gangster, because my sense of friendship is such that a bit of the gangsters: first my friends and on the other the rest of the world, with which I have very little contact"

"They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again—not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in a irreparable world, where everything had already been lost."

"They were people of slow lives, to which they looked not become old or sick or die, but they were slowly fading in his time, turning memories mists of another time, until assimilated oblivion."

"They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation."

"Thing in good marriage is not happiness but stabilty."

"They're things I told with utter naturalness. Don't know if I explain . . . That is . . . I know La Sierpe, I was in La Sierpe, but of course I didn't see the “gold gourd" or the “white crocodile" or any of those things. But it was a reality that lived inside the consciousness of the people. The way they told it you felt no doubt that that's how it was. In a certain way it's the method of One Hundred Years of Solitude."

"They're all alike ... at first they behave very well, they're obedient and prompt and they don't seem capable of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they go to ruin."

"Things have a life of their own, the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

"Things have a life of its own-the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent, it's all about waking up their souls."

"Things have a mind of its own; it’s simply the matter of waking up their souls."

"Think of love as a state of grace; not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself."

"Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping."

"This afternoon, thinking all this against a gloomy window, where snow falls, with more than fifty years over, and still not sure who I am or what the hell am I doing here, I have the impression that the world was like from my birth until the Beatles started singing."

"This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold."

"This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it."

"This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father."

"This is the cow, you have to milk it every morning to produce milk and the milk must be boiled to mix with coffee and make coffee."

"This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it."

"Those who do not sing cannot even imagine the joy of singing."

"Thus, the corresponding long-awaited, which have each prepared questions, but the answers predicted it, turned into a daily talk normally."

"Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters."

"Time was not passing... it was turning in a circle."

"Time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment."

"To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love... Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own."

"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."

"Today, retired but not defeated, I enjoy the sacred privilege of writing at home, with the phone off the hook so that no one can disturb me, and without a censor looking over my shoulder to see what I am writing."

"Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion."

"To me, it appears that, like a plant that lives, I was the picture of an ideal world, that I was not just made ??up of what I want, what I think - I also was what I did not love; NOT what I want to reincarnate."

"Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging."

"Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."

"Travel to leave home and abandon your friends and trying to aviation fly to discover paths new and scouring the roads trying to change. Travel be worn like a madman to say: I do not care that you want in return. Return admitting little to sip from the cup and would like to start. traveling to feel that you are a poet and written in terms message and want The hugs hug while up to the door eager to knife and let yourself to kiss travel to become worldly and recognize the new people and go back to the start. Begins Mada hand educated from the strong and feel lonely. Travel to leave your home, worn like a madman and says everything and nothing in the card-mail. To sleep in another bed and feel that the time is short travel is back"

"Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk."

"Trying to provoke him into a terrifying sentence, I said: The only definitive thing is death. Yes, he said, but it isn't easy to get there when one's condition is as good as yours."

"Ultimately literature is nothing but carpentry. Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work involved."

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

"Until you're about the age of twenty you read everything, and you like it simply because you are reading it. Then between twenty and thirty you pick up what you want, and you read the best, you read all the great works. After that you sit and wait for them to be written. But you know the least know, the least famous writers, they are the better ones."

"Unfortunately, we are still meet the motive for suicide is not love."

"Ursula was the last of the parade. The dignity of his grief, the weight of his name, the convincing vehemence of his statement did waver for a moment the scales of justice. You have taken this very seriously scary game, and you have done well, because you are doing your duty, he said to the members of the tribunal. But do not forget that as long as God gives us life, we will continue to be mothers, and that revolutionary or not, we have the right to pull you pants down and showed me how to take the first disrespect."

"Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading."

"We are the orphans of our son."

"We are not the assembly of men only slaves poor of prejudice, and while it was decided a woman sexual intercourse man what, there is no wall only way to go, and Fort only, not considered immoral, but be prepared for violation of the foundation, and so they do not count the expense of the existence of God."

"Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant."

"Ursula wondered if it was better to lie just once in the grave and throw him over the earth, and ask God, without fear, if we really believed that people were made ??of iron to withstand so many pains and mortifications. And wondering and asking would stoking his own trouble and felt irrepressible desires to let loose and not have mouthed as an outsider and after allowing a moment of rebellion, the moment so many times you want and as many times postponed, to cut the resignation by root and shit once and for all and take heart the endless piles of profanity that he had to swallow over a century of conformity."

"We must open our eyes and realize that good things are within us, where feelings need no motives or desires of reason. The important thing is to enjoy the time and learn your life, because life is in the eye of the learn to see."

"We have to do a lot of things and sell them to the rich before they died. They are all sick and die. What should have rotted from the inside when the doctor forbids them to be angry."

"We had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were."

"We'll grow old waiting."