Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes]; 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo [ˈɡaβo] or Gabito [ɡaˈβito] 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; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
García Márquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success.
Upon García Márquez's death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."
When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.
When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.
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.
She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.
One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.
She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .
Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.
If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.
The bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.
My heart has more rooms in it than a whore house.
Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.
Most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but ... none was as specific as old age.
And realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.
It was a love of perpetual flight.
At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.
Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.
Surrealism runs through the streets.
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.
Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.
She nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.
I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.
The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.
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.
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.
An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.
The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.
I want the same one, the way she always is, without failures, without fights, without bad memories.
I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.
'You can't eat hope,' the woman said. 'You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.
A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.
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.
I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.
There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.
Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.
A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame.
I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.
Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it.
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.
And the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.
Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.
Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.
Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.
He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.
They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.
In the end all books are written for your friends.
Longer Version:
In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think.
And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.
The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can.'
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.
A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.
Shame has poor memory.
Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people.
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.
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.
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.
He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.
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.
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.
Children's lies are signs of great talent.
Things have a life of their own, the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
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.
He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.
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.
Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.
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.
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!
The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.
But he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.
He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.