One Hundred Years of Solitude Quotes

“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 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

“Meme did not know and never would that the centenarian witch was her great-grandmother. Nor would she have believed it after the aggressive realism with which she revealed to her that the anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it would have still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke without trembling Pietro. Crespi’s smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“That was how the relationship of jolly comradeship was born between father and daughter, which freed him for a time from the bitter solitude of his revels and freed her from Fernanda’s watchful eye without the necessity of provoking the domestic crisis that seemed inevitable by then.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Nothing,” Meme answered. “I was only now discovering how much I loved you both.” Amaranta was startled by the obvious burden of hate that the declaration carried.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Sitting at the head of the table, drinking a chicken broth that landed in her stomach like an elixir of resurrection, Meme then saw Fernanda and Amaranta wrapped in an accusatory halo of reality. She had to make a great effort not to throw at them their prissiness, their poverty of spirit, their delusions of grandeur.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“She really did not have any definite vocation, but she had earned the highest grades by means of an inflexible discipline simply in order not to annoy her mother.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In spite of her secret hostility toward the colonel, it was Fernanda who imposed the rigor of that mourning, impressed by the solemnity with which the government exalted the memory of its dead enemy.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He saw the clowns doing cartwheels at the end of the parade and once more he saw the face of his miserable solitude when everything had passed by and there was nothing but the bright expanse of the street and the air full of flying ants with a few onlookers peering into the precipice of uncertainty. Then he went to the chestnut tree, thinking about the circus, and while he urinated he tried to keep on thinking about the circus, but he could no longer find the memory. He pulled his head in between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his forehead against the trunk of the chestnut tree. The family did not find him until the following day at eleven o’clock in the morning when Santa Sofía de la Piedad went to throw out the garbage in back and her attention was attracted by the descending vultures.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Meme still did not reveal the solitary fate of the family and she seemed entirely in conformity with the world, even when she would shut herself up in the parlor at two in the afternoon to practice the clavichord with an inflexible discipline. It was obvious that she liked the house, that she spent the whole year dreaming about the excitement of the young people her arrival brought around, and that she was not far removed from the festive vocation and hospitable excesses of her father. The first sign of that calamitous inheritance was revealed on her third vacation, when Meme appeared at the house with four nuns and sixty-eight classmates whom she had invited to spend a week with her family on her own initiative and without any previous warning.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Her life was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He continued living at Petra Cotes’s but he would visit Fernanda every day and sometimes he would stay to eat with the family, as if fate had reversed the situation and had made him the husband of his concubine and the lover of his wife.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Rebeca, the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the whiteness of the walls, the one who did not carry the blood of her veins in hers but the unknown blood of the strangers whose bones were still clocing in their grave. Rebeca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce womb, was the only one who had the unbridled courage that Úrsula had wanted for her line.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons. She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride. She reached the conclusion that the son for whom she would have given her life was simply a man incapable of love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Also almost a hundred years old, but fit and agile in spite of her inconceivable fatness, which frightened children as her laughter had frightened the doves in other times, Pilar Ternera was not surprised that Úrsula was correct because her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Mientras ella cantaba de placer y se moría de risa de sus propias invenciones, Aureliano se iba haciendo más absorto y callado, porque su pasión era ensimismada y calcinante. Sin embargo, ambos llegaron a tales extremos de virtuosismo, que cuando se agotaban en la exaltación le sacaban mejor partido al cansancio.
Se entregaron a la idolatría de sus cuerpos, al descubrir que los tedios del amor tenían posibilidades inexploradas, mucho más ricas que las del deseo".”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“Amaranta, invece, la cui durezza di cuore la spaventava, la cui concentrata amarezza la amareggiava, le si rivelò a un ultimo esame come la donna più tenera che fosse mai esistita, e capì con pietosa lucidità che le ingiuste torture a cui aveva sottoposto Pietro Crespi non erano dettate da una volontà di vendetta, come tutti credevano, e il lento martirio con cui aveva frustrato la vita del colonnello Gerineldo Márquez non era dovuto al fiele della sua amarezza, come tutti credevano, ma che entrambi i comportamenti erano nati da uno scontro mortale fra un amore smisurato e un'invincibile vigliaccheria, e alla fine aveva trionfato la paura irrazionale che Amaranta aveva sempre avuto del suo stesso cuore tormentato.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad

“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

“It's the largest diamond in the world."
"No," the gypsy countered. "It's ice.”
― 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 Arcadio 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

“Nostradamus,”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“«No me importa tener cochinitos, siempre que puedan hablar».”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“decía José Arcadio Buendía. «Lo esencial es no perder la orientación.»”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“«Las cosas tienen vida propia –pregonaba el gitano con áspero acento–, todo es cuestión de despertarles el ánima.»”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“I was born a son of a bitch and I’m going to die a son of a bitch.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Amaranta went into the kitchen and put her hand into the coals of the stove until it hurt her so much that she felt no more pain but instead smelled the pestilence of her own singed flesh.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The Italian would arrive at dusk, with a gardenia in his buttonhole,”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Acuérdate siempre de que eran mas de tres mil y que los echaron al mar”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad

“Apártense, vacas, que la
vida es corta”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad