01c. 1970 ADSitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz, and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
02c. 1970 AD...he considered respect for one's given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
04c. 1970 ADLittle by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
05c. 1970 ADWherever 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.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
06c. 1970 ADThe secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
07c. 1970 ADbut he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
08c. 1970 ADAlways. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
09c. 1970 ADArcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
10c. 1970 ADShe felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
11c. 1970 ADIt is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing their dreamsGabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
12c. 1970 ADAs I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
13c. 1970 ADThere was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
14c. 1970 ADBut what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on, "is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
15c. 1970 ADHe 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.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
16c. 1970 ADDogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors,Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
18c. 1970 ADI nee to reason for a plague, ... As far as I know no comets or eclipses have been forecast, and our sins are not great enough for God to be concerned with us.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
19c. 1970 ADShe did not understand why women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be when at home.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
20c. 1970 ADThings have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
21c. 1970 ADThe world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed from the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
22c. 1970 ADhe dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
23c. 1970 ADDon't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
24c. 1970 ADt nightfall, atthe oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes roseout of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirredthe certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.Gabriel García Márquez / quote ↗
