100 Quotes by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, is revered for his profound influence on modern literature through his distinctive style known as magical realism. His works, such as "One Hundred Years of Solitude," blend the ordinary with the extraordinary, infusing the mundane with fantastical elements. Marquez's storytelling blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination, allowing readers to explore complex themes while immersed in a world where the supernatural coexists with the everyday. With his mastery of language and the depth of his narratives, Marquez delves into the intricacies of human experience, often weaving political and social commentary into his tales. His impact on global literature lies not only in the imaginative realms he creates but also in his ability to provoke contemplation on the intersections of love, memory, power, and time.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes
Justice limps along, but gets there all the same. (Quote Meaning)
Only God knows how much I love you. (Meaning)
Give me a prejudice and I will move the world. (Quote Meaning)
Shame has poor memory. (Meaning)
There had never been a death so foretold. (Quote Meaning)
A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain. (Meaning)
Cease, cows, life is short. (Quote Meaning)
More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude. (Meaning)
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard. (Quote Meaning)
Hate and love are reciprocal passions. (Meaning)
He who awaits much can expect little. (Quote Meaning)
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. (Meaning)
How will I ever get out of this labyrinth! (Quote Meaning)
(Meaning)
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship! (Quote Meaning)
To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. (Meaning)
People spend a lifetime thinking about how 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. (Quote Meaning)
The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. (Meaning)
Remember, the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. (Quote Meaning)
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.
It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
If I knew that today would be the last time Iād see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul.
A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart. (Meaning)
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry. (Quote Meaning)
Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.
All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. (Meaning)
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. (Quote Meaning)
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.
No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.
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.
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. (Meaning)
Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it
The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. (Quote Meaning)
Don't struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.
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.
The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.
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.
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.
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. (Meaning)
I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him. (Quote Meaning)
An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.
Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are
The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.
No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.
No medicine cures what happiness cannot. (Meaning)
For those who may be hurting over lost love.
Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened.
But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.
Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.
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.
Do not allow me to forget you
This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.
Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.
One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.
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.
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.
A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
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.
It is life, more than death, that has no limits. (Quote Meaning)
The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. (Meaning)
"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."
A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.
Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.
She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.
I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.
There is always something left to love. (Quote Meaning)
opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .
Please allow me to wipe the slate clean. Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. Florentino Ariza, 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.
He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.
The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
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.
I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.
Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love. (Meaning)
My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.
Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country.
The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.
All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.
Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.
A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.
Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
There is no greater glory than to die for love. (Quote Meaning)
When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.
Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle. (Meaning)
Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
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.
One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. (Quote Meaning)
She was lost in her longing to understand. (Meaning)
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.
You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.
Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. (Quote Meaning)
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.
Be calm. God awaits you at the door.
and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.
Always tell what you feel. Do what you think.
Old people, with other old people, are not so old.
Inspiration gives no warnings.
Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel. (Meaning)
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.
I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.
This soup tastes like windows
It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.
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.
Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.
The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast. (Quote Meaning)
Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.
Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.
If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.
Music is important for one's health.
What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation. (Meaning)
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.
The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight.
and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.
When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.
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.
nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.
At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.
It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.
Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.
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.
We'll grow old waiting.
wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. (Quote Meaning)
If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world. (Meaning)
She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.
but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.
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.
As a writer I'm merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.
This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.
He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.
She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.
I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Curiosity is one of the many masks of love.
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.
The only everyday and eternal reality was love.
Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.
Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.
Fatality makes us invisible. (Quote Meaning)
Freedom is often the first casualty of war.
The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.
Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
It was a love of perpetual flight.
Necessity has the face of a dog.
She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.
Jealousy knows more than truth does.
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.
ā Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
