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"During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms."
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"And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss."

"Solitude with God is a place for pregnancy."

"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."

"Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows."

"There is a magic in walking alone, in thinking alone: If there is no one to contact you around, the universe starts contacting you!"

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."
Explore more quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory."

"Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment."

"You can't eat hope,' the woman said.You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied."

"Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards."

"A mother discovers 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."

"The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love."

"Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment."

"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."

"He walked out into a different city, one that was perfumed by the last dahlias of June, and onto a street out of his youth, where the shadowy widowsfrom five o'clock Mass were filing by. But now it was he, not they, who crossed the street, so they would not see the tears he could no longer hold back, not his midnight tears, as he thought, but other tears: the ones he had been swallowing for fifty-one years, nine months and four days."
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