Gabriel Garcia Marquez famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
There is no greater glory than to die for love.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
In the end all books are written for your friends.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It is life, more than death, that has no limits.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
She was lost in her longing to understand.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It's much more important to write than to be written about.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He who awaits much can expect little.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. 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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
There is always something left to love.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Be calm. God awaits you at the door.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Music is important for one's health.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
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.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.
-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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