Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

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 I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.

A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

Never stop smiling not even when you're sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

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.

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.

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 Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.

The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that 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.

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

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.

I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.

For those who may be hurting over lost love: Don't cry because it is over... smile because it happened.

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love...

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.

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.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

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.

She 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.

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.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

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.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

"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 is life, more than death, that has no limits.