Great Throughts Treasury

"Well, Aureliano said. Tell me what it is. Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile. That you would be good in a war, she said. Where you put your eye, you put your bullet."

"We'll turn to ashes in this house without men, but. we won't give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing us weep"

"What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break."

"What's happening, she sighed, is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here anymore."

"What hurts me to die is not to die for love."

"When he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia."

"When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection."

"When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead."

"When he wakes up - he said, remind me that I'm going to marry her!"

"When I returned to this forgotten village, trying to rebuild so broken mirror scattered shards of memory"

"When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end."

"When I wake up, he said, remind me that I'm going to marry her."

"When the enter beta epidemic, no one escapes him."

"Where art thou that thou art not here."

"While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person."

"Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?"

"Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end."

"Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel."

"Wisdom comes to us when it is useless."

"Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse."

"With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

"With my joshing I've probably contributed toward the idea that I lack literary education, that I write only from personal experiences, that my sources are Faulkner, Hemingway, and other foreign writers. Little is known about my knowledge of Colombian literature. No doubt, my influences, especially in Colombia, are extra-literary. More than any book, I think what opened my eyes was music, vallenato songs."

"With that discouraging explanation many 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."

"With The Thousand and One Nights, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them."

"Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino's most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aidas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions."

"Yeah, but he [Dostoevsky] didn't get cured. Isn't it true that one of the most unforgettable scenes in world literature is when Smerdyakov falls down the steps? Besides, we never find out if it's true or not, or if it was a real attack or just make-believe. It's unforgettable."

"Years from now they do not come like they used to."

"You can be in love with several people at once, and all with the same pain, without betraying any."

"Woe is me, if it's love, the sorrow."

"You can't eat hope,' the woman said."

"Your good work seems at times undermined by disillusionment."

"You'll see, he said, will be re-spread especially among the priests, the Americans and the rich, nothing for the poor... because they are always so fucked that shit day any value the poor will be born without ass ."

"You're an ass. What God gave you in the eyes I took in brains."