Gabriel garcia marquez quotes

Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

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.

we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.

I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.

All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.

Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

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.

Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both 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 moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

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.

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

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.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

Inspiration gives no warnings.

Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.

If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.

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.

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

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

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.

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

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 of Christ.

Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.

If you love something - let. If it is yours - it will come back. I love you not because of who you are, but for who I am when I'm with you.

"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

Music is important for one's health.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

Do not allow me to forget you

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

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

She was lost in her longing to understand.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

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.

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.

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

We'll grow old waiting.

She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

She felt the abyss of disenchantment.

Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.

Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

This soup tastes like windows

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.

Intrigued by that enigma, 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.

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.

Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

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

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

There is always something left to love.

...they enjoyed the miracle of loving 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 old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

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

The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don't understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

For those who may be hurting over lost love: Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened.

If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

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

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. Florentino Ariza, Love in the Time of Cholera

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

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

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.

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

Old people, with other old people, are not so old.

If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.

Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.

The only everyday and eternal reality was love.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

Fatality makes us invisible.

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

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

It was a love of perpetual flight.