Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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| What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Here Is A Collection Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Most Inspiring Quotes. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes On Love, Life And Death. Marquez Quotes About Writing. Quotes And Sayings About Happiness, Dreams And Memory By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes and Sayings
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
There is always something left to 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.
Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.
Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.
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.
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.
My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house.
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| No medicine cures what happiness cannot. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
Time was not passing... It was turning in a circle.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.
He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.
A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
Do not allow me to forget you.
"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.
A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.
Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.
He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.
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.
It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. 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 in itself.
She felt the abyss of disenchantment.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
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.
With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.
Cease, cows, life is short.
She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
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.
Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.
He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy vicitim to the charitible deceptions of nostalgia.
Only God knows how much I love you.
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.
Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.
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.
She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.
Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.
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.
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
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.
There is no greater glory than to die for love.
"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.
Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.
And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.
Freedom is often the first casualty of war.
One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.
Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.
She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.
Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.
I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.
Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.
The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.
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.
Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it.
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.
Morality, too, is a question of time.
Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.
In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio BuendÃa was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.
And taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
It was a love of perpetual flight.
To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.
If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.
He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.
I've remained a virgin for you.
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.
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.
She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment.
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.
A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.
He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!
Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.
"When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her."
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.
Because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.
The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.
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 life, more than death, that has no limits.
The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams.
Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
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.
Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.
One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever.
The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.
Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
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.
There had never been a death so foretold.
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.
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.
Fermina, he said, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.
jealousy knows more than truth does.
My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.
It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.
I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
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.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
I must try and break through the cliches 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.
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.
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.
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.
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