Best 487 quotes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez on MyQuotes

A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.

A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.

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

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

All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.

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

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

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

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.

An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path.

And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love.

and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.

...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.

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

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

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.

A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

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.

Because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one's honor, and remain imperturbable even when forced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty.

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

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.

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.

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.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

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.

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

Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.

Cease, cows, life is short.

Children's lies are signs of great talent.

Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.

Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.

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.

Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.

Do not allow me to forget you

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.

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

Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.

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.

Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.