Great Throughts Treasury

"I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world."

"I do not belong to the land of man does not dead to him under the soil."

"I do not see her again even randomly, throughout the rest of his life and only God knows how much pain it cost him this heroic decision and how many bitter tears shed, locked in the bathroom, to survive after a personal disaster... On the same night of disclaiming, while undress to sleep, repeated at Firmin Dasaion bitter litany of the morning of insomnia, its sudden slain, the crying was coming dusk, coded signs of hidden love that he was telling say and were the miseries of old age. I needed someone to tell it not to die, to not have to tell the truth after all those tantrums were dedicated to domestic ritual of love. She listened carefully, but without looking at him, without saying anything while accepting the clothes that he was making. Smelled any outfit without any movement showing her anger, she did tangle as like throwing in the basket of dirty clothes. Did not find the smell but it does not change anything, tomorrow will be another day dawned. Before kneel to pray in front of a small shrine in the bedroom, he closed the account of his misery with a sad and heartfelt sigh: I think going to die. She, without lifting lid, he replied. It would be better, he said. So would we're both more reassured. Years ago, in a crisis of a dangerous illness, he had talked about the possibility of dying and she had given him the same curt reply. The doctor Urbino had yielded the same hardness women, which makes it possible for the Earth keeps rotating around the Sun, ignoring that she always use a screen to hide anger fear. In that case, the more terrible than all, the fear of being left without him. That night, however, he had wished his death with all the strength of her heart and this certainty the inconvenience. After he heard her crying, sobbing in the dark, very slowly, biting her pillow to not be heard. Dared to console her, knowing that it would be like a tiger comforted wounded by an arrow, and neither found the courage to tell her that the reason for the lament that had disappeared in the afternoon and had eradicated forever from the memory."

"I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him."

"I don't think you can write a book that's worth anything without extraordinary discipline."

"I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing."

"I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams."

"I had been on death, indeed, but he had returned because he could not bear solitude."

"I had not stopped wanting an instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of the conquered peoples, especially in the most abject, and materialized in the stench of dried blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all parts. He fled from her trying to wipe his memory not only with distance, but a dazed fury that his comrades qualified recklessness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, more war resembled Amaranta. So suffered exile, looking for ways to kill her with his own death."

"I go to seek a great perhaps."

"I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work."

"I had to teach him to think of love as a state of grace that was not a means to anything but an origin and an end in itself."

"I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet."

"I have learned that everyone wants to live on the peak of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled."

"I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground."

"I have always believed that it takes greater account of the love that faith."

"I have no friends, he said. And if I do have any left it won't be for long."

"I have learned that when a newborn child squeezes for the first time with his tiny fist his father's finger, he has him trapped forever."

"I have to say, because I distinguishes leagues 'm ugly, shy and anachronistic."

"I know English well enough to have poisoned myself with Time magazine every week for twenty years."

"I know Florentino Aretha with what he had suffered so much without being aware: Is that one can adores several people at the same time, and suffer pain the same for all of them, without betraying any of them"

"I knew what she thought of them by the changes in her silence."

"I learned a thousand nights, what I will never forget, that you should only read books that force us to re-read it."

"I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway ... [but the] 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."

"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."

"I lived there, and of course, when I'd get up next day, the only other people still around were the prostitutes. We were good friends, and we'd make breakfasts that I'll never forget. They'd lend me soap. I remember that I'd always run out of soap and they'd lend it to me .. And that's where I finished writing Leaf Storm."

"I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives."

"I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain."

"I must try and break through the clichés about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone."

"I noted with the compassion of the children that life has transformed gradually into the fathers of their fathers, and for the first time he was sorry not to have been together with her ??in the solitude of his mistakes."

"I prayed to God to grant him at least a moment so he would not leave without knowing how much I had wanted over the doubts of both and felt an irresistible urge him to start life over again from the beginning to say all that are left unsaid, and re-do anything well they had done wrong in the past. But he had to surrender to the intransigence of death."

"I never used to write down all the ideas that occur to me while writing. I believed if I forgot them they were not important, and the ones that really mattered were those I remembered. Now I write them all down."

"I say to him: Thou shalt not steal something that never needs a man to eat."

"I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance."

"I remember that I was working at El Heraldo. I'd write a piece and they'd pay me three pesos for it, and maybe an editorial for another three. The fact is I didn't live anywhere, but right near the newspaper there were some hotels for transients. There were prostitutes around the place. They'd go to some little hotels that were right above the notary offices. The notaries were downstairs, the hotels upstairs. For a peso and fifty cents they'd let someone in and that gave you admission for 24 hours. And then I started making the greatest discoveries: hotels for one peso fifty that were unknown! It was impossible"

"I soon realized that the desire to forget it was the most powerful instigator to remember."

"I soaked the conversations up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking."

"I sleep less, dream more and more every minute that I saw your eyes to put on too much, you lose sixty seconds of light."

"I started to read The Little Prince by Saint Exupéry, a French author that the whole world admires more than French. It was the first story I listened to with much attention, without waking, that it was necessary to read the clock two days until I finished it. I went with Perrault's stories, the Bible, the One Thousand and One Nights in an aseptic version for children and, because of differences in her sleep, I realized I have more degrees of depth that depends on how seemed interesting i have read. When I felt that I could not turn out the lights and I was sleeping, taking her in his arms until the cocks sing. I was so happy that he kissed her eyelids, easy, and one night went down like a light from heaven smiled for the first time. Later, without any reason, twisted in bed, I turned and said angrily, did Isabel snails cry. Exalted by the illusion of a dialogue, I asked the same tone: Whose were they? She did not answer. Her voice was tinged plebeian, as if I were her, but one alien found within himself. Any doubt in my mind then disappeared: he prefers sleeping."

"I tell myself now, that ever since I was little my sense of social decency has been more developed than my sense of death."

"I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before."

"I took the opportunity to suffer as much as now and you are young, because these things do not last the length of life."

"I told her about my life, I read into her ear the first drafts of my Sunday columns in which, without my saying so, she and she alone was present."

"I understood that he was my host, though he only glanced at me and walked by, and I did not have the audacity to signal to him in any way. He hurried into the station and came out again minutes later with no expression of hope. At last he saw me and pointed with his index finger: You're Gabito, right? I answered him with all my heart: Almost, now."

"I venture to think that it is this outsized reality and not just its literary expression, which this year has attracted the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is more that figure out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little to the imagination, because the biggest challenge for us has been the lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, the crux of our solitude."

"I want the same one, the way she always is, without failures, without fights, without bad memories."

"I went a moment without thinking about it, everything you eat and drink tasted her life she was at all times and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be the supreme joy of his soul as to die with her."

"I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be an absolute catastrophe. I would certainly be interested in deserving it, but to receive it would be terrible. It would just complicate even more the problems of fame. The only thing I really regret in life is not having a daughter."

"I went up. In one of the rooms upstairs Mercedes was taking a nap . . . I lay down at her side and said to her, “He's dead!" . . . And I cried for two hours."

"I was on the verge of ruin but well-compensated by the miracle of still being alive at my age."