Love in the Time of Cholera

by Gabriel García Márquez

“He is ugly and sad,” she said to Fermina Daza, “but he is all love.”

“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”

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.”

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.