One Hundred Years of Solitude Quotes

“It was also José Arcadia Buendía who decided during those years that they should plant almond trees instead of acadias on the streets, and who discovered, without ever revealing it, a way to make them live forever. Many years later, when Mancondo was a field of wooden houses with zinc roofs, the broken and dusty almond trees still stood on the oldest streets, although no one knew who had planted them.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Years of Solitude

“The years nowadays don’t pass the way the old ones used to,' she would say, feeling that everyday reality was slipping through her hands.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“And she did not have to see him to know that he was there, because the butterflies were always there.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“En la furia de su tormento trataba inútilmente de provocar los presagios que guiaron su juventud por senderos de peligro hasta el desolado yermo de la gloria. Estaba perdido, extraviado en una casa ajena donde ya nada ni nadie le suscitaba el menor vestigio de afecto. Una vez abrió el cuarto de Melquíades, buscando los rastros de un pasado anterior a la guerra, y solo encontró los escombros, la basura, los montones de porquería acumulados por tantos años de abandono. En las pastas de los libros que nadie había vuelto a leer, en los viejos pergaminos macerados por la humedad había prosperado una flor lívida, y en el aire que había sido el más puro y lumimoso de la casa flotaba un insoportable olor de recuerdos podridos”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Úrsula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity. “Shit!” she shouted.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The last veterans of whom he had word had appeared photographed in a newspaper with their faces shamelessly raised beside an anonymous president of the republic who gave them buttons with his likeness on them to wear in their lapels and returned to them a flag soiled with blood and gunpowder so that they could place it on their coffins. The others, more honorable, were still waiting for a letter in the shadow of public charity, dying of hunger, living through rage, rotting of old age amid the exquisite shit of glory.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“(Στρατηγός Αουερλιάνο Μπουενδία:) Τότε ακριβώς αποφάσισε πως κανένας άνθρωπος, ούτε ακόμα κι η Ούρσουλα, δεν θα τον πλησίαζε σε λιγότερο από τρία μέτρα. Απ' το κέντρο του κύκλου με την κιμωλία που οι υπασπιστές του σχεδίαζαν και όπου μόνο εκείνος μπορούσε να μπει, αποφάσιζε, με σύντομες κι αμετάκλητες διαταγές, για την τύχη του κόσμου.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Entonces José Arcadio Buendía hecho tretina doblones en una cazuela, y los fundió con raspadura de cobre, oropimienta, azufre y plomo. Puso a hervir todo a fuego vivo en un caldero de aceite de ricino hasta obtener un jarabe espeso y pestilente más parecido al caramelo vulgar que al oro magnífico. En azarosos y deseperados procesos de destilación, fundida con siete metales planetarios, trabajado con mercurio hermético y vitriolo de Chipre, y vuelta a cocer en manteca de cerdo a falta de aceite de rábano, la preciosa herencia de Úrsula quedó reducida a un chicharrón carbonizado que no pudo ser desprendido del fondo del caldero.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“¿Qué día es hoy?" Aureliano le contestó que era martes. "Eso mismo pensaba yo", dijo José Arcadio Buendía. "Pero de pronto me he dado cuenta de que sigue siendo lunes como ayer. Mira el cielo, mira las paredes, mira las begonias. También hoy es lunes.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“O mundo estará fodido de vez", disse então, "no dia em que os homens viajarem em primeira classe e a literatura no vagão de carga.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death did not really matter to him but life did, and therefore the the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The rain had spared him from all emergencies of passion and had filled him with the spongy serenity of a lack of appetite.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“إن بدء الحرب أسهل بكثير من إنهائها”
― غابرييل غارسيا ماركيز, مئة عام من العزلة

“That night the guard brought down Mauricio Babilonia as he was lifting up the tiles to get into the bathroom where Meme was waiting for him, naked and trembling with love among the scorpions and the butterflies as she had done almost every night for the past few months. A bullet lodged in his spinal column reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies, who did not give him a moment's peace, and ostracized as a chicken thief.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“On a certain occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut tree and invited him to a game, José Arcardio Buendía would not accept, because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“But Melquíades' tribe, according to what the wanderers said, had been wiped off the face of the earth because they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“La mulata adolescente, con sus teticas de perra, estaba desnuda en la cama.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“Úrsula, que había aprendido de su madre el valor medicinal de las plantas, preparó e hizo beber a todos un brebaje de acónito, pero no consiguieron dormir, sino que estuvieron todo el día soñando despiertos.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“Así fue siempre, ajeno a la existencia de sus hijos, en parte porque consideraba la infancia como un período de insuficiencia mental, y en parte porque siempre estaba demasiado absorto en sus propias especulaciones quiméricas”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“Aquel espíritu de iniciativa social desapareció en poco tiempo, arrastrado por la fiebre de los imanes, los cálculos astronómicos, los sueños de transmutación y las ansias de conocer las maravillas del mundo.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“porque prefiero cargarlo vivo y no tener que seguir cargándolo muerto por el resto de mi vida.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Il colonnello Aureliano Buendía promosse trentadue sollevazioni armate e le perse tutte. Ebbe diciassette figli maschi da diciassette donne diverse, che furono sterminati uno dopo l’altro in una sola notte, prima che il maggiore compisse trentacinque anni. Sfuggì a quattordici attentati, a settantatré imboscate e a un plotone di esecuzione, Sopravvisse a una dose di stricnina nel caffè che sarebbe bastata a ammazzare un cavallo. Respinse l’Ordine del Merito che gli conferì il presidente della repubblica. Giunse a essere comandante generale delle forze rivoluzionarie, con giurisdizione e comando da una frontiera all’altra, e fu l’uomo più temuto dal governo, ma non permise mai che lo fotografassero.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Taciturno, silenzioso, insensibile al nuovo soffio di vitalità che faceva tremare la casa, il colonnello Aureliano Buendía comprese a malapena che il segreto di una buona vecchiaia non è altro che un patto onesto con la solitudine.”
― Gabriel García Márquez , Cem anos de solidão

“Pero no olviden que mientras Dios nos dé vida, nosotras seguiremos siendo madres, y por muy revolucionarios que sean tenemos derecho de bajarles los pantalones y darles una cueriza a la primera falta de respeto”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had. time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been imagined in the shadows of the other rooms.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“İnsanlar birinci mevkide giderken, edebiyat yük katarına atılırsa, dünyanın anası bellenmiş demektir.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude