Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotations

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

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

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

Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.

The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.

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

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

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

From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.

Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.

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

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.

Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

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.

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.

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.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

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.

The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don't understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

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

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.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

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.

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

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.

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.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

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

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

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.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

There is always something left to love.

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

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.

...and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.

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.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

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.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

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

If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

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.

and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.

I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.

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.

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 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.

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.

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you

a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.

It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.

Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

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.

Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion.

...The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

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.

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever.

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

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.

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

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.

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

The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

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.

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.