Quotes
List here any quote, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book, Love in the Time of Cholera. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
... "this death trap of the poor." It was not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps.
ReplyDeleteBut no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr. Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father's walnut desk and the tufted leather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquility and fragrance of an abbey.
ReplyDelete... wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
ReplyDeleteIt is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.
ReplyDeleteAt eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to the world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
ReplyDeleteShe prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistable longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what had been left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past.
ReplyDeleteThe people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.
ReplyDeleteFlorentine Ariza, on the other hand , had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not remind him of her.
ReplyDelete... during the most arduous period of his grief he would lock himself in the suffocating little rooms to read verses and tearful serialized love stories, and his reveries left nests of dark swallows on the balconies and the sound of kisses and the beating of wings in the stillness of siesta.
ReplyDelete“Tell him yes,” she said. “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.”
ReplyDeleteWhen at last they were alone in the bedroom, Cousin Hildebranda bolted the door with a crossbar and from under the straw matting of her bed took out a manila envelope sealed in wax with the emblem of the national telegraph. It was enough for Fermina Daza to see her cousin’s expression of radiant malice for the pensive scent of white gardenias to grow again in her heart’s memory, and then she tore the red sealing wax with her teeth and drenched the eleven forbidden telegrams in a shower of tears until dawn.
ReplyDeleteOne night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
ReplyDeleteFermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything in this world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly.
ReplyDeleteAt midnight he put on his Sunday suit and went to stand alone under Fermina Daza's balcony to play the love waltz he had composed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for years had been the emblem of their frustrated complicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence.
ReplyDeleteLittle by little, listening to her sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the countless islands of her secret life.
ReplyDeleteDuring the ceremony, and later at the reception, she wore a smile that seemed painted on with white lead, a soulless grimace that some interpreted as a mocking smile of victory, but in reality was her poor attempt at disguising the terror of a virgin bride.
ReplyDelete"It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases."
ReplyDelete.... 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.
ReplyDeleteThe only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
ReplyDelete... a man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.
ReplyDelete... 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.
ReplyDelete"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
ReplyDelete"The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom."
ReplyDeleteIt was the rust of routine, which he had despised and feared so much, but which had protected him from an awareness of his age.
ReplyDeleteShe wanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness, even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.
ReplyDelete... it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of wind blown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.
ReplyDeleteWith 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 a crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse."
ReplyDeleteShe could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her husband for having left her alone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his slippers that always looked like an invalid's, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death.
ReplyDelete... she remembered to order the carpenter to leave a chink where light could come into the coffin as a consolation to him.
ReplyDelete"Death has no sense of the ridiculous," he said, and added in sorrow: " above all at our age."
ReplyDelete.... (he) talked at length about the same subject: the past, the good memories from the past, for he was desperate to find the hidden road from the past that would bring him relief. For that was what he needed: to let his soul escape through his mouth.
ReplyDeleteShe felt the chimerical angel of the past flying overhead, and she tried to elude it.
ReplyDeleteHumanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
ReplyDeleteOld people, with other old people, are not so old.
ReplyDeleteEven in his youth Florentino Ariza climbed up and down stairs with special care, for he had always believed that old age began with one's first minor fall and that death came with the second.
ReplyDelete"It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not."
ReplyDeleteCaptain Samaritano had an almost maternal affection for the manatees, because they seemed to him like ladies damned by some extravagant love, and he believed the truth of the legend that they were the only females in the animal kingdom that had no mates.
ReplyDeleteThey were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love is always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
ReplyDelete