Gabriel García Márquez
Master of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Most quoted
"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."
— from Living to Tell the Tale, 2002
"The only thing that came to her in that moment was the memory of the afternoon when her father had read the piece about the siege to her, and she was shocked that she could remember it with so many details when she could not remember what she had done the previous week."
— from Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985
"Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to relinquish themselves to an exit as painful and dramatic as the one that obliged them to emerge for the first time."
— from Love in the Time of Cholera, 1986
All quotes by Gabriel García Márquez (267)
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
There is always something left to love.
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
The problem with our time is that we have too much information and not enough wisdom.
He who awaits much can expect little.
The world would have been a better place if we had loved more and judged less.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
The past is a lie, memory has no road, life has no meaning.
Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.
The first condition of a good writer is to be a good reader.
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.
The only thing that matters is love.
Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the anguish of life was invincible.
There is no greater glory than to die for love.
The world is so recent that many things lack names, and in order to indicate them it is necessary to point.
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the past.
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
The only thing that can save us from the absurd is love.
Contemporaries of Gabriel García Márquez
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014).