sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love
nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
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.
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had.
Never stop smiling not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.
Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.
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.
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 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.
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.
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.
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.
Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later.
My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.
If God hadn’t rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.
wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
You can’t eat hope,’ the woman said.You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,’ the colonel replied.
Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
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.
You people have a religion of death that fills you with the joy and courage to confront it…I do not. I believe the only essential thing is to be alive.- Abrenucio
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
Eran gentes de vidas lentas, a las cuales no se les veía volverse viejas, ni enfermarse ni morir, sino que iban desvaneciéndose poco a poco en su tiempo, volviéndose recuerdos, brumas de otra época, hasta que los asimilaba el olvido.
She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.
The ferocity of Santiago Nasar’s fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination.
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
One had to live a long time to know a man’s true nature.
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
But when they changed their plans time and time again, the dates became confused, the periods were mislaid, and one day seemed so much like another that one could not feel them pass.
The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times.
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
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.
Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.
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.
She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.
When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.
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.
four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.
I do not believe in decent women who do not know how to play the piano.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys.
nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps perpetuate love
Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love
Ceasing to believe caused a permanent scar in the place where one’s faith had been, making it impossible to forget.
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.
She reminded him that the weak will never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom,and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide them with the security they need in order to face life.
…her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people…
Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl’s wrist so she would not lose track of her in the shadows of the house.
literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.
Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet.”May God have mercy on you,” he said. And erased him from his heart.
For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.
The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.
A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.
Men demand much more than you think,” she would tell her enigmatically. “There’s a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.
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.
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.
No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich. “No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
No matter whom I’m with I’ll always be alone,” she said. And she added with a roguish touch: “Excellency.
I’ll never fall in love again,” he once confessed to José Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. “It’s like having two souls at the same time.
…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 them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Nu exista pe lume leac care sa tamaduiasca ceea ce nu tamaduieste fericirea/ There is no cure in this world which heals what happiness does not heal.
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.
Merciful God!” sighed the General. “We’ve arrived.” And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world.
When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, what’s the rest of it?
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.
She made a visual inventory of the disaster and confirmed that the girl was curled up like a snail, her head hidden between her arms: terrified but intact. “My God!” Rosa Cabarcas exclaimed. “What I wouldn’t have given for a love like this!
She was impressed by its simplicity and its seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot.
A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.
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.
…as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth…
our two postcard hearts were frightened in unison under the tenacious look of the unfathomable old man who kept on eating one banana after another
A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old.
Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.
The experience taught him [Salvador Allende] too late that a system cannot be changed from the government but from the power.
It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good
The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.
…he considered respect for one’s given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.
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.
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
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.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreams
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
Dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors,
I nee to reason for a plague, … As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us.
Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.
he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.
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.
Don’t worry,” he would say, smiling. “Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.
t nightfall, atthe oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes roseout of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirredthe certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.
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.
Remember that everything that is good, whatever it’s origin, comes from the holy spirit.
I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.
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.
…as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror…only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.
Bad luck doesn’t have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I’m going to die a son of a bitch. – Captain Roque Carnicero
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking ofher for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out ofhand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months,and four days ago.
The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
..he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate,..
He was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end.
During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms.
Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
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.
I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.
The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will.
You can’t come in, colonel,” she told him. “You may be in command of your war, but I’m in command of my house.