"After dinner, at five o'clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip."

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

"Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end."

"She was lost in her longing to understand."

"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."

"Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal."

"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."

"The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination."

"The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart."

"Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,' he said.'That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,' said Abrenuncio. 'If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur."

"They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion."

"Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!""Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:"Just look at me."

"She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom,and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide them with the security they need in order to face life."

"Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors."

"Necessity has the face of a dog."

"It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good."

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

"That would be fine, she said "If we're alone, we'll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody's having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of."

"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo."

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

"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."

"Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines."

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

"But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness."

"We men are the slaves of prejudice,' he had once said to her. '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."

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

"I'll never fall in love again," he once confessed to José Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. "It's like having two souls at the same time."

"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."

"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."

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

"But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and 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."

"Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can."

"And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again."

"He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: "Only God knows how much I loved you."

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

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

"Hate and love are reciprocal passions."

"A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old."

"What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break."

"Florentino Ariza never had anotheropportunity to see or talk to Fermina Daza alone in the many chanceencounters of their very long lives until fifty-one years and ninemonths and four days later, when he repeated his vow of eternalfidelity and everlasting love on her first night as a widow."

"During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms."

"The most important thing in marriage is not happiness but stability."

"At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death."

"Nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

"The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had th eopportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remeber, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. "And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart."

"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood."

"Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability."

"Merciful God!" sighed the General. "We've arrived." And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world."

"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."

"That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers."