"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."

"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."

"She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written."

"Nigromanta took him to her room, which was lighted with false candlesticks, to her folding cot with the bedding stained from bad loves, and to her body of a wild dog, hardened and without a soul, which prepared itsself to dismiss him as if he were a frightened child, and suddenly it found a man whose tremendous power demanded a movement of seismic readjustment from her insides."

"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."

"It is easier to start a war than to end it."

"The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

"What worries me 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."

"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."

"The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them."

"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."

"That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later."

"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 world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

"Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me."

"Shame has poor memory."

"Take care,' said Delaura. 'Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.''Saint Thomas said it, and I will be guided by him,' said the Abbess: '"One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth."

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

"Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed."

"Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors."

"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."

"While a person does not give up on sex sex does not give up on the person."

"All that Delaura noticed, though, was the uproarious crowing of the roosters.'There are only six of them, but they make enough noise for a hundred,' said the Abbess. 'Furthermore, a pig spoke and a goat gave birth to triplets.' And she added with fervor: 'Everything has been like this since your Bishop did us the favor of sending us his poisoned gift.'She viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura. As they walked across it she pointed out to Delaura that there were flowers of exceptional size and color, some with an unbearable scent. As far as she was concerned, everything ordinary has something supernatural about it."

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

"Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one's faith had been, making it impossible to forget."

"I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano."

"I am condemned to a theatrical destiny."

"When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, what's the rest of it?"

"I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license."

"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."

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

"If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

"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."

"Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones."

"Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love."

"She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best."

"At eight-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."

"Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía 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."

"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."

"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."

"Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves."

"He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard."

"He is ugly and sad... but he is all love."

"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."

"I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite."