Great Throughts Treasury

"In the winter nights, while boiling the soup in the fireplace, missed the warmth of his back room, the hum of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the train whistle in the drowsiness of siesta, like soup longed to Macondo Winter by the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor and fleeting larks spring. Stunned by two opposing nostalgia like two mirrors, he lost his wonderful sense of unreality, until eventually recommend to everyone to leave Macondo, that they forgot all that he had taught the world and the human heart, which cagaran of Horace and that wherever they were always remember that the past was a lie, that memory had back roads that any old spring was unrecoverable, and that love was more foolish and stubborn truth anyway ephemeral."

"In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. 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. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request."

"In this town there are no thieves. Everyone knows everyone."

"Infidels, but not unfair."

"Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors."

"INTERVIEWER: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you."

"Is that died without understanding his death."

"Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in the best interest he found love, because looking that eventually she would love her."

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."

"It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat."

"It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself."

"It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things."

"It should make then ashamed if they don't arrive at anything this time."

"It took me many years not to make arrogant distinctions between good and bad."

"It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance."

"It was a love of perpetual flight."

"It is life, more than death, that has no limits."

"It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not."

"It occurred to me that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission."

"It seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from the common people he did not understand why no one was as upset by her singing castanet his heels on the pavement of the street, or why hearts fighting not pounding the sighs of his flying, or why nobody was mad love under the caress of her hair, the flight of her hands, the gold of her smile."

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."

"It seems sissies... It was a shame because it was spread with butter and eat it alive."

"It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them."

"It was always offset by without claim to love and without demanding that he loves, but in the hope of finding something like love, but without the problems of love!"

"It was an absurd journey."

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight."

"It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry 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 passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms 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."

"It was completely simple... I have told her that he die for it like intestinal colic."

"It was in Zipaquirá. I had nothing to do and, to avoid getting bored I'd hole up at the school library, where they had the Aldeana collection. I read the whole thing!"

"It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line."

"It was impossible to conceive of two creatures so different who got along so well and loved each other so much."

"It was finally real life, with my heart safe, and sentenced to die for good love in happy agony any day after my hundred years."

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

"It was not to accommodate, in particular, how life can benefit from the many coincidences banned literature, to take place without any obstruction declared the death process to such an extent."

"It was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good memories, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to deal with the past."

"It was something new for me. Seduction and deceit did not know I had chosen randomly eternal lovers of night... and had made ??love without love. That night I discovered the incredible pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without desire or hindrance imboldirea decency."

"It was the first time in a half century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the mercy of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren."

"It was still a young man does not know that heart memory erase all the bad memories and good memories inflation .. And we are thanks to this trick last we can afford."

"It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending."

"It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code."

"It was the last that was falling from a past whose annihilation not consummated because annihilating continued indefinitely, consuming within itself, running out every minute but never finished unfinished."

"It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them."

"It was to be some time before Aureliano realized that home was much arbitrariness in the example of Catalan scholar, for whom wisdom is not worth doing if it was not possible to use it to invent a new way to prepare the chickpeas."

"It was the time when they 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 mortal trails, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."

"It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia."

"It was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when one could do nothing, but contemplate the rain"

"'It's amazing how you can be so happy for so many years, amid many peloteras, of many pods, dammit, not really knowing if it is love or not. When finished vent, someone had turned off the moon. The ship moved with measured steps, putting one foot before putting the other: an immense animal stalking. Fermina Daza had returned from anxiety."

"It's better not to go to sleep, because life will become more tender"

"It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment."

"It's life, rather than death, that has no limits."