"And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant."
— Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)

"How I love them. How good they are. They endure endless hours of me talking about the future. They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is."
— Carole Maso (The Art Lover: A Novel)

"I believe in books."
— Carole Maso (The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth)

""One loves art more than life; it's better than life, don't you think, Ali? It doesn't disappoint so," she sighed. "It's not so frightening," she said, her eyes filled with terror."
— Carole Maso

"Huddled around the fire of the alphabet..."
— Carole Maso

"...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

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

"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

"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

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

"The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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)

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

"This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"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

""O comandante olhou Fermina Darza e viu em suas pestanas os primeiros lampejos de um orvalho de inverno. Depois olhou Florentino Ariza, seu domínio invencível, e se assustou com a suspeita tardia de que é a vida, mais que a morte, a que não tem limites""
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"I ask myself how I could give in to this perpetual vertigo that I in fact provoked and feared. I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love."
— 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)

"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)

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
— James Joyce

"yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
— James Joyce

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. "
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."
— Toni Morrison

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
— James Joyce

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
— James Joyce

"Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"
— James Joyce (The Dead)

"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. "
— James Joyce

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women."
— James Joyce (Selected Letters)

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
— James Joyce

"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart? "
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."
— Murray Gell-Mann (The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex)

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— James Joyce

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better."
— Samuel Beckett

"The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
— Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)

"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that."
— Samuel Beckett

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
— Samuel Beckett

"I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had."
— Samuel Beckett

"Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"
— Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)

"She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time."
— Samuel Beckett (Murphy)

"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent."
— Samuel Beckett (Endgame)

"Samuel Beckett once said, "very word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness" ... On the other hand, he SAID it."
— Art Speigelman

"Estragon: People are bloody ignorant apes."
— Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts)