"I see nothing that can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor," he wrote to her. "In the future you will be alone, although at your husband's side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation."

"He dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips, her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins."

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

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

"Our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another."

"But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass."

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

"Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking ofher for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out ofhand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,and four days ago."

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

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

"It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people..."

"Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supereme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities."

"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."

"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."

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before."

"My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show."

"She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death."

"The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will."

"One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature."

"JosA Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language."

"Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet."

"I nee to reason for a plague, ... As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us."

"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."

"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."

"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. 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."

"And realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality."

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

"But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love."

"She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. "My God!" Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. "What I wouldn't have given for a love like this!"

"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."

"You can't come in, colonel," she told him. "You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house."

"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."

"Eran gentes de vidas lentas, a las cuales no se les veía volverse viejas, ni enfermarse ni morir, sino que iban desvaneciéndose poco a poco en su tiempo, volviéndose recuerdos, brumas de otra época, hasta que los asimilaba el olvido."

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

"She did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home."

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

"For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood."

"I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading."

"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."

"The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power."

"No matter whom I'm with I'll always be alone," she said. And she added with a roguish touch: "Excellency."

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

"Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl's wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house."

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."

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

"Remember that everything that is good, whatever it's origin, comes from the holy spirit."

"My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house."

"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."

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