One Hundred Years of Solitude Quotes

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“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

“The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The first of the
line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“El mundo habrá acabado de joderse -dijo entonces- el día en que los hombres viajen en primera clase y la literatura en el vagón de carga.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“من المؤكد أن ما رأيتموه كان حلما ، ففي ماكوندو لم يحدث ولا يحدث شيء ، ولن يحدث شيء أبدا.إنها قرية سعيدة”
― جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز, مئة عام من العزلة

“The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Había estado en la muerte, en efecto, pero había regresado porque no pudo soportar la soledad.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“y que en cualquier lugar en que estuvieran recordaran siempre que el pasado era mentira, que la memoria no tenía caminos de regreso, que toda primavera antigua era irrecuperable, y que el amor más desatinado y tenaz era de todos modos una verdad efímera.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cem Anos de Solidão

“لا ينتسب الإنسان إلى أرض لا موتى له تحت ترابها”
― غابرييل غارثيا ماركيز, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Children inherit their parents' madness.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "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

“In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Sin embargo, antes de llegar al verso final ya había comprendido que no saldría jamás de ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos ( o los espejismos) sería arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres en el instante en que Aureliano Babilonio acabara de descifrar los pergaminos, y que todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre, porque las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenian una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that 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

“He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“El mundo era tan reciente que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para nombrarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo".”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude