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...
Interpretation
Growing old is a result of losing the ability to love, not just the passage of time.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the idea that love and the ability to fall in love are integral to maintaining a youthful spirit. He suggests that as people age, they often believe love diminishes, but in reality, it is the cessation of love that contributes to the feeling of aging. Thus, by continuing to love, one stays vibrant and youthful.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of love in sustaining a joyful life.
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.
Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .
He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
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.
We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.
We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.
Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.
At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship.
I imagine a world in which all humans are born with an intact capacity to love, and I am willing to devote my life to making it happen.
I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.
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