Love in the Time of Cholera

by Gabriel García Márquez

One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.

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.

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.

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.