Gabriel Garcia Marquez

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.

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

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.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

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

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

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.

Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.

nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.

In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.

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...