Great Throughts Treasury

"Both remained attentive to the growing rumors about the seriousness of the plague, and even against their wishes had to talk again about issues they were common, as in the times when they hated least. To him it was clear. He always believed that he loved her daughter, but the fear of rabies forced him to confess that he deceived himself for comfort. Bernarda, however, do not even ask, it was fully aware not love or be loved by her, and both seemed fair. Much of the hatred they both felt for the girl was so she was the one and the other. However, Bernarda was willing to make the farce of tears and observe a mourning mother."

"But had won and lost by the same motive, pure and sinful pride."

"Both looked back then on the wild revelry... and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude."

"Both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love."

"But about seven o'clock the windows shut to convene, fresh air began to move, and was put jubilant crowds into the streets without any other purpose than to live."

"But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none."

"But I believe without any doubt at all that our greatest good fortune was that even in the most extreme difficulties we might lose our patience but never our sense of humor."

"But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

"But he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude."

"But I knew, plus a proverb that from experience that a happiness so easy I could not last long."

"But if something had learned together was that wisdom comes when it is useless."

"But in the days that followed I realized he was only what he seemed: a giant baby with a heart too big for his body."

"But the examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and the only thing I felt was particularly urgent need to die. He had only an insidious interrogation, first at him and then the mother, to check once again that the symptoms of love are those of cholera."

"But the next morning, while night owls slept, I climbed trembling to her cubicle and woke her, weeping aloud with a crazed love that lasted until it was carried away without mercy by the violent wind of real life."

"But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love."

"But then I realized that life itself is the greatest source of inspiration and that dreams are only a very small part of that torrent that is life."

"By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money. That's the lowest kind of whore."

"But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."

"But when my Spanish publisher told me he was going to print eight thousand copies I was stunned, because my other books had never sold more than seven hundred. I asked him why not start slowly, but he said he was convinced that it was a good book and that all eight thousand copies would be sold between May and December. Actually they were all sold within one week in Buenos Aires."

"But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simple-mindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long."

"Caracas was still a remote village colonial province, ugly, sad, flat, but the afternoons of Avila was heartbreaking in nostalgia."

"Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget."

"Cease, cows, life is short."

"Can you imagine that the lyrics to the National Anthem were chosen because they were a great poem by Núñez? That it was first chosen as an anthem you might accept, but what prompts horror is that it was chosen as Anthem because it was poetry."

"Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards."

"Children's lies are signs of great talent."

"Colonel Márquez, Watch your heart, Aureliano, he said, rotting death."

"Come on, girl, 'he said trembling with rage: tell us who it was. She lingered just long enough to 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 forever. -Santiago Nasar, 'he said."

"Colonel Aureliano Buendía realized, that old age is not honored more than a pact with solitude."

"Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break."

"Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!"

"Come here, he said. Rebeca obeyed. She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat, feeling knots forming in her intestines, while Jose Arcadio stroked her ankle with the tips of his fingers, then her calves, then her thighs, murmuring: Oh, little sister, little sister. She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with 3 slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconcievable pleasure of that unbearable pain..."

"Dawns in the dormitory had a suspicious resemblance to happiness."

"Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia."

"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."

"Death was not only a permanent probability, as it had always been, but an immediate reality."

"Depart, cows, life is short."

"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses."

"Do not allow me to forget you."

"Do you think she will agree? Oh, my wise sad, well you're old, but not fool-Cabarcas Rosa said with laughter. That poor creature is parallel with love for you."

"Do not worry - he smiled. - To die is much more difficult than one thinks. In his case it was true. Confidence that his day is scheduled put it in a mysterious sanctity in immortality by a specified date, which made ??him immune to the dangers of war and finally allowed him to gain a defeat, much more difficult, much more bloody and costly than victory."

"Do whatever you want, but don't lose that child, she said. There's no greater misfortune than dying alone."

"Do not talk about politics, the colonel told our business is to sell fishes."

"Do not open that door 'he said. 'The corridor is full of difficult dreams."

"Don't open that door, she said. The hallway is full of difficult dreams. And I asked her: How do you know? And she told me: Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart."

"Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed."

"Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love."

"Dr. Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed."

"Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ‘ça y est’. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday. Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: Only God knows how much I loved you."

"Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain."