Great Throughts Treasury

"God of the poor! Sighed the general. We are coming. It was. Well there was the sea, and the sea was across the world."

"Halfway through one August day, while she was embroidering with her friends, she heard someone coming to the door. She didn't have to look to see who it was. He was fat and was beginning to lose his hair, and he already needed glasses to see things close by, she told me. But it was him, God damn it, it was him!"

"Happy in their own world of simple realities."

"Hate and love are reciprocal passions."

"He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard."

"He [Aureliano II ] had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

"He confessed that he had never dared to ride."

"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

"He confessed that he had never dared to ride. Temo both horses and the chickens, he said. It's a shame, because the lack of communication with horses humanity has been delayed, said Abrenuncio. If you ever broke up we could manufacture the centaur."

"He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear."

"He dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins."

"He continued to be so even when the body began to send the first warning signs, because he had always had the iron health of poor people."

"He did everything in a methodical and unhurried, as if there was anything that was not planned for her since birth."

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living 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 people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."

"He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear."

"He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster"

"He had a way of speaking that served rather to hide than to say."

"He felt like a naughty tease her sea destination have searched without finding ... and then finding him without looking."

"He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

"He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death."

"He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions a arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dung hill of war, the more the was resembled Amarant."

"He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited: O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow. She did not understand. It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother, he explained. He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did. Was he a priest too? A soldier, he said. Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle. When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering. I am always in this state, he said. And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask: And now? And now nothing, he said. It is enough for me that you know. He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads. Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: What's the rest of it? I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end, he said. She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them."

"He had quit drinking coffee thirty years ago by order of his doctors, but he said: If confirmed days I was going to die, I will come back to the coffee."

"He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words."

"He imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously."

"He is ugly and sad ... but he is all love."

"He offered then the camellia he wore in his buttonhole. She refused it: It 'a flower that committed."

"He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude."

"He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: Only God knows how much I loved you"

"He said that love was an emotion contrary to nature that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral."

"He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet"

"He said that love was a feeling unnatural condemning two strangers mean unhealthy dependence, the more intense the more ephemeral."

"He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials..."

"He said: But we did not die one here. The rights belong to the land of his dead under its soil."

"He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past."

"He shook my hand and said goodbye with a sentence that might have been either good advice or a threat: Take good care of yourself."

"He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians."

"He slept without knowing it, but knowing that still alive in sleep, his spare half the bed and lay on her back on the left, as always, but that it was missing the balance of another body on the other side. Thinking of dreams, he thought he could never sleep well and dream, began to sob without changing position on your side, long after they have finished singing roosters, and woke her excessive sunlight in the morning without it."

"He spoke in the world incredible things, there are exactly, on the other bank of the river, there are all kinds of magical apparatus, while we continue to live."

"He then made ??a last effort to search his heart the place where you were rotting affections, and could not find it."

"He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people."

"He touched muttering the words, with the violin in tears, and inspiration so intense that the opening bars started barking dogs in the street, and then the city, but then gradually fell silent for the spell of the music, and the waltz ended with an eerie silence. The balcony did not open, and no one looked into the street, not even the serene almost always came with your candle trying to thrive on the scraps of serenades. The event was a spell relief for Florentino Ariza, because when you saved the violin in its case and left dead in the streets without looking back, it was felt as following morning, but had been for many years with irrevocable arrangement never return."

"He was able to recognize it in the tumult, and through the tears of his irremediable pain of dying without it, looked one last time, forever and ever, with the brightest eyes, the saddest and most grateful that he had seen in half a century of life together, and he managed to say in a last breath: God knows how much I loved you."

"He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time."

"He thought the column was magnificent, everything it said about old age was the best he had ever read, and it made no sense to end it with a decision that seemed more like a civil death."

"He was another person, despite his firm decision and anguished effort to continue to be the same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love."

"He was aware he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be obstacle to their inventing true love."

"He was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them."

"He was born like the great queens of history with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck."

"He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened."