Gabriel García Márquez

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.

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

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.

sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love

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.

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.

Be calm. God awaits you at the door.

...he considered respect for one's given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.

The feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love.

It was that wisdom to us when it can no longer do any good

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