Gabriel García Márquez

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

“What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.”

“That’s how it goes,” Úrsula said, “but not so much.”

When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

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

The lesson was not interrupted, but 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.

He had made notes of these premature observations, intending to write a practical supplement to the Lovers’ Companion, but the project met the same fate as the previous one after Ausencia Santander sent him tumbling with her old dog’s wisdom, stood him on his head, tossed him up and threw him down, made him as good as new, shattered all his virtuous theories, and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.

Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

'Forever,' he said.

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.

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

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice."