Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Latin American Spanish: 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes

1. “Only God knows how much I love you.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

2. “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

3. “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

4. “Never stop smiling not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

5. “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

6. “No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

7. “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

8. “Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

9. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

10. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

11. “No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

12. “There is always something left to love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

13. “Don’t struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

14. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

15. “Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

16. “The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

17. “El secreto de una buena vejez no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

18. “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

19. “A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

20. “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

21. “Do not allow me to forget you.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

22. “Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

23. “It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

24. “If you love something – let. If it is yours – it will come back. I love you not because of who you are, but for who I am when I’m with you.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

25. “No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

26. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

27. “Be calm. God awaits you at the door.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

28. “Sex is one’s consolation when love is not enough.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

29. “Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

30. “Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

31. “Morality, too, is a question of time.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

32. “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

33. “To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

34. “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

35. “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale…”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

36. “Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

37. “I have never done anything except write, but I don’t possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

38. “You can’t eat hope,? the woman said. You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,? the colonel replied.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

39. “Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

40. “If God hadn’t rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

41. “Cease, cows, life is short.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

42. “I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

43. “They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

44. “Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

45. “For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

46. “She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she’ll be sorry if she isn’t guided by her heart.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

47. “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

48. “Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams…”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

49. “I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

50. “Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

51. “Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

52. “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

53. “Shame has poor memory.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

54. “Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

55. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

56. “The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

57. “When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

58. “Music is important for one’s health.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

59. “It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

60. “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

61. “How strange women are.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

62. “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

63. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

64. “A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

65. “A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

66. “A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

67. “He who awaits much can expect little.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

68. “Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

69. “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

70. “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

71. “Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

72. “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

73. “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

74. “Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

75. “It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

76. “He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

77. “Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

78. “He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

79. “Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

80. “Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

81. “A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

82. “I’ve remained a virgin for you.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

83. “She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

84. “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 Garcí­a Márquez

85. “The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

86. “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

87. “Hate and love are reciprocal passions.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

88. “Fatality makes us invisible.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

89. “She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

90. “Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

91. “I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

92. “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

93. “This soup tastes like windows.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

94. “Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

95. “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.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

96. “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.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

97. “As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

98. “The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

99. “At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

100. “Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

101. “As a writer I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

102. “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

103. “It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

104. “It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

105. “He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

106. “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 Garcí­a Márquez

107. “The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

108. “There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

109. “We’ll grow old waiting.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

110. “In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

111. “The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don’t understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

112. “She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

113. “For a week I did not take off my mechanic’s coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I’d never had anyone to do that for.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

114. “He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

115. “More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

116. “I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

117. “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

118. “There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

119. “One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

120. “Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

121. “Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

122. “An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

123. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

124. “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

125. “It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

126. “It is easier to start a war than to end it.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

127. “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

128. “Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

129. “The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

130. “He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

131. “Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

132. “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

133. “But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

134. “Necessity has the face of a dog.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

135. “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

136. “I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

137. “Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

138. “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

139. “Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

140. “You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

141. “Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

142. “The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

143. “Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

144. “La fatalidad nos hace invisibles.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

145. “The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

146. “Intrigued by that enigma, 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.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

147. “Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

148. “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

149. “And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

150. “The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

151. “Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

152. “One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

153. “It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

154. “She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

155. “While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

156. “I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

157. “Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

158. “Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

159. “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

160. “She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

161. “Inspiration gives no warnings.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

162. “From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

163. “People spend a lifetime thinking abouthow they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me, it’s very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

164. “When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

165. “Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

166. “It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

167. “Le temps ne passe pas, il tourne en rond.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

168. “I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

169. “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

170. “She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

171. “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

172. “Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

173. “Let me stay here,” he said. “There was soap.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

174. “The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not – when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

175. “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

176. “Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

177. “Dr Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

178. “I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they’re dead, because that’s where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

179. “When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

180. “He was weary of the uncertainty of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

181. “He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

182. “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

183. “The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

184. “Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

185. “I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

186. “The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

187. “The most important thing Paris gave me was a perspective on Latin America. It taught me the differences between Latin America and Europe and among the Latin American countries themselves through the Latins I met there.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

188. “It was a love of perpetual flight.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

189. “He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

190. “Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

191. “Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

192. “No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

193. “Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

194. “And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

195. “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

196. “Horses frighten me as much as chickens do,’ he said. ‘That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,’ said Abrenuncio. ‘If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

197. “There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

198. “In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

199. “Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

200. “In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”
— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez