"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"...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."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

"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."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"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."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"There is always something left to love."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Freedom is often the first casualty of war."
— Gabriel García Márquez (The General in His Layrinth)

"There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"‘What does he say?’ he asked.
‘He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re gong to die.’
‘Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.’"
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"He is ugly and sad... but he is all love."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.'"
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"...and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday & eternal reality was love..."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"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"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"... wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning after breakfast."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"It was a love of perpetual flight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Be calm. God awaits you at the door. "
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"...and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice, 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."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it"
— Gabriel García Márquez

""races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.""
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Of Love and Other Demons)

"He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)

"Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Ninguna persona que merece tus lagrimas. Y quien las merezcas no te hara llorar."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experience many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)