Quote collection
358 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits."
"Justice limps along, but gets there all the same."
"And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were."
"She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man."
"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."
"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 world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness."
"The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange."
"his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love."
"Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake."
"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."
"Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but ... none was as specific as old age."
"Shame has poor memory."
"She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best."
"He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people."
"Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them."
"How strange women are."