“I became
aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not
happy, love.”
“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, and that
was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the
youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back
then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an
annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to
find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of
sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at
the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two
worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together
like dogs.”
– One
Hundred Years of Solitude
“If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you
tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would
be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and
call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would
hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over
again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and
would not just assume foolishly you know it already.”
– One Hundred Years of Solitude
“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.”
“To him she
seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he
could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her
heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze
stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the
movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He
had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her
character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
“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.”
“I love you
not for whom you are (but who I am when I'm by your side)”
“It's enough
for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
Just because
someone doesn't love you as you wish, it doesn't mean you're not loved with all
his/her being.
“All human
beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
“Maybe God
wants you to meet many wrong people, before you meet the right one, so when it
happens you'll be thankful”.
“The only regret I will have in dying is
if it is not for love.”
– Love in the Time of Cholera
“It was
inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of
unrequited love.”
The problem
with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be
rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
– Love in the Time of Cholera
“I
discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each
subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the
well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete
system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I
discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence,
that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off
as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to
succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care
about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of
the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”
– Memories of my Melancholy Whores
“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.”
– One Hundred Years of Solitude
“With her Florentino Ariza learned what
he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in
love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and
not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to
himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”
– Love in the Time of Cholera
“Together they had overcome the daily
incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and
fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they
both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most
conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life
would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer
mattered: they were on the other shore.” Love in the Time of Cholera
“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.”
– One Hundred Years of Solitude