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“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.”
no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.
Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer.
But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
he was convinced in the solitude of his soul that he had loved in silence for a much longer time than anyone else in this world ever had.
“Fermina,” he said, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.
In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.
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.
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.
He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
“You have to know languages when you go to sell something,” she said with mocking laughter. “But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to understand you.”
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
“That may be the reason he does so many things,” she said, “so that he will not have to think.”
“Let us go someplace where we can cry together,” he said.
he always behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an unfaithful husband but a tenacious one, who fought endlessly to free himself from his servitude without causing her the displeasure of a betrayal.
she accepted him for what he really was: a man passing through.
she will continue to go to bed with him whenever he desires, as long as he knows how to move her to passion each time.
The break with Sara Noriega, however, revived his dormant grief, and once again he felt as he did on those afternoons of endless reading in the little park,
Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.
knowing that nothing pleases patients more than talking about their ailments,
Dr. Juvenal Urbino never thought that a physician his age, who believed he had seen everything, would not be able to overcome the uneasy feeling that he was ill when he was not.
Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe.
Her misfortune, or the village’s, was that she could never remember it afterward as it was in reality, but only as she had imagined it before she had been there.
no consideration for her situation, or the slightest respect for her grief, and had seared her soul with a flaming insult that still made it difficult for her to breathe.
whenever he found himself on the edge of catastrophe, he needed the help of a woman.
“After all, letters belong to the person who writes them. Don’t you agree?” He made a bold move. “I do,” he said. “That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended.”
she realized that her pain was stronger than her desire to be with him.
