One Hundred Years of Solitude Quotes

“If they believe it in the Bible, I don't see why they shouldn't believe it from me.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Arcadio found the formality of death rediculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“(...) os seres humanos não nascem para sempre no dia em que as suas mães os dão à luz, mas que a vida os obriga uma e outra vez ainda a parirem-se a si mesmos.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is."
Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile.
"That you would be good in a war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she become to men.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre, porque las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“No se le había ocurrido pensar hasta entonces que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se había inventado para burlarse de la gente (...)”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time, Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Габриел Гарсија Маркез, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“...tenía la rara virtud de no existir por completo sino en el momento oportuno.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Love on one side was defeating love on the other, because it was characteristic of men to deny hunger once their appetites were satisfied.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Elaboró el plan con tanto odio que la estremeció la idea de que lo habría hecho de igual modo si hubiera sido con amor,”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Cien años de soledad

“We have still not had a death. A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground." he said.
"If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die" replied Ursula with a soft firmness.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

“الماضي لم يكن سوى كذبة, وأن لا عودة للذاكرة. وأن كل ربيع يمضي لا يمكن أن يستعاد, وأن أعنف الحب وأطوله وأبقاه لم يكن في النهاية سوى حقيقة عابرة.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“و فى إحدى المرات، عاد أبولينار موسكورت من إحدى رحلاته الكثيرة، و هو موزع الفكر مشغول البال بسبب حالة البلاد السياسية. فقد كان الأحرار عازمين على خوض الحرب ضد الحكومة. و ما كان لدى أوريليانو، فى تلك الفترة، سوى أفكار مشوشة و سطحية و غامضة عن الفرق بين الأحرار و المحافظين. فقام حموه بتوضيح الأمور له فى عدة دروس تفصيلية. فذكر له أن الأحرار ماسونيون، و سيئون و يريدون شنق الكهنة و رجال الدين، و يدعون إلى الزواج المدنى و إقرار الطلاق. و ينادون بالمساواة فى الحقوق بين الأبناء الشرعيين و الأبناء غير الشرعيين. و يعملون على تمزيق وحدة البلاد بإقامة نظام اتحادى فيدرالى ينتزع الامتيازات من السلطة المركزية. أما المحافظون فيستمدون سلطتهم من الله نفسه مباشرة، و هم يسهرون على حفظ النظام العام و الأخلاق العائلية، و هم المدافعون عن دين المسيح و مبدأ السلطة، و لا يقبلون بتجزئ البلاد إلى كيانات مستقلة ذاتياً.

ما حدث منذ من 200 عام فى أمريكا الجنوبية يشبة ما يحدث فى مصر الاَن فالمحافظون هم المتأسلمون الذين يتهمون الاخرين بالماسونية و يعتبرون نفسهم رجال الله فى الأرض”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“لكن أحداً لم يمت لنا بعد. والمرء لاينتمي إلى أي مكان، ما دام ليس فيه ميت تحت التراب.”
― جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Cuídate el corazón…te estás pudriendo vivo.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Ursula was the last in line. Her gloomy dignity, the weight of her name, the convincing vehemence of her declaration made the scale of justice hesitate for a moment. "You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty," she told the members of the court. "But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The air was so damp that fish could have come in through doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning Ursula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end in a placid swoon and she had already asked them to take her to Father Antonio Isabel, when Santa Sofia de la Piedad discovered that her back was paved with leeches. She took them off one by one, crushing them with a firebrand before they bled her to death.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“From that time on the parish priest began to show signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude