One Hundred Years Of Solitude Quotes
"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."
"Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house."
"If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!" Úrsula shouted. "But don't try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children."
"We are all children of our time," José Arcadio Buendía would say. "The main thing is not to lose our bearings."
"If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."
"It's the largest diamond in the world." "No," the gypsy countered. "It's ice."
"A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."
"Even when they brought the ice they did not advertise it for its usefulness in the life of man but as a simple circus curiosity."
"Love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights."
"Now you really are a man," she told him. "You’re going to be a father."
"Let them dream," he said. "We’ll do better flying than they are doing, and with more scientific resources than a miserable bedspread."
"My boy," she exclaimed, "may God preserve you just as you are."
"If you don’t fear God, fear him through the metals."
"In this town, we do not give orders with pieces of paper," he said without losing his calm.
"Because I would rather carry you around alive and not have to keep carrying you around dead for the rest of my life."
"You may stay here, not because you have those bandits with shotguns at the door, but out of consideration for your wife and daughters."
"One morning, without opening the door, without calling anyone to witness the miracle, he placed the first roll in the pianola and the tormenting hammering and the constant noise of wooden lathings ceased in a silence that was startled at the order and neatness of the music."
"She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation."
"Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep."
"Her hermetism was not odd. Although she seemed expansive and cordial, she had a solitary character and an impenetrable heart."
"The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning or end."
"She knew that the mailman’s mule arrived only every two weeks, but she always waited for him, convinced that he was going to arrive on some other day by mistake."
"Mad with desperation, Rebeca got up in the middle of the night and ate handfuls of earth in the garden with a suicidal drive, weeping with pain and fury."
"Love is a disease. With so many pretty and decent girls around, the only thing that occurs to you is to get married to the daughter of our enemy."
"He had discovered that the more he drank the more he thought about Remedios, but he could bear the torture of his recollections better."
"When I die, burn mercury in my room for three days."
"He merely stretched on his stool a little and shrugged his shoulders when Father Nicanor began to rise up from the ground."
"She would spend whole hours sucking her finger in the bathroom, holding herself back with an exhausting iron will so as not to eat earth."
"Future generations, who never let the lamp go out, would be puzzled at that girl in a pleated skirt, white boots, and with an organdy band around her head."
"He had been around the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a crew of sailors without a country."
"She got to be so sincere in the deception that she ended up by consoling herself with her own lies."
"In spite of her having lost her charms and the splendor of her laugh, he sought her out and found her by the trail of her smell of smoke."
"He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict dosing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most."
"In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous."
"Tell my wife," he answered in a well-modulated voice, "to give the girl the name of Úrsula."
"I have nothing to repent," Arcadio said, and he put himself under the orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee.
"Oh, God damn it!" he managed to think. "I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios."
"Go home, Mama," he said. "Get permission from the authorities to come see me in jail."
"That's how it goes," Aureliano admitted, "but not so much."
"I ask that the sentence be carried out in Macondo," he said.
"If he follows this path he'll spend Christmas at the ends of the earth."
"As long as God gives me life," she would say, "there will always be money in this madhouse."
"We've lost him forever," Úrsula exclaimed. "If he follows this path he'll spend Christmas at the ends of the earth."
"I'm not going to marry anyone," she told him, "much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can't marry him."
"We're fighting this war against the priests so that a person can marry his own mother."
"I don't care if they're born as armadillos," he begged.
"He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late."
"It was as if his return home, the possibility of existing without concerning himself with everyday necessities, had awakened in him the lewd and lazy leanings of his uncle José Arcadio."
"The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother José Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity."
"She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the countless men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure."
"The best friend a person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died."
"He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides."
"His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together."
"Searching for a cure against the chill, he had the young officer who had proposed the murder of General Teófilo Vargas shot."
"Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction."
"She had it washed and painted, changed the furniture, restored the garden and planted new flowers, and opened doors and windows so that the dazzling light of summer would penetrate even into the bedrooms."
"The only cases that were impossible to classify were those of José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. They were so much alike and so mischievous during childhood that not even Santa Sofía de la Piedad could tell them apart."
"On the day of their christening Amaranta put bracelets on them with their respective names and dressed them in different colored clothing marked with each one’s initials, but when they began to go to school they decided to exchange clothing and bracelets and call each other by opposite names."
"In time things became less disordered. The one who came out of the game of confusion with the name of Aureliano Segundo grew to monumental size like his grandfathers, and the one who kept the name of José Arcadio Segundo grew to be bony like the colonel, and the only thing they had in common was the family’s solitary air."
"What’s happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don’t come here any more."
"No one must know their meaning until he has reached one hundred years of age."
"Let’s hope that he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house."
"This one will be a priest," she promised solemnly. "And if God gives me life he’ll be Pope someday."
"To the health of the Pope," Aureliano Segundo toasted.
"Take those creatures somewhere else," Úrsula ordered him the first time she saw him come in with his fine fighting birds. "Roosters have already brought too much bitterness to this house for you to bring us any more."
"All right," Úrsula said, "but on one condition: I will bring him up."
"Now," he said in a final way, "I hope that nobody in this house ever talks to me about money again."
"It’s as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning."
"It’s as if she’s come back from twenty years of war," he would say.
"She’s got you so bewitched that one of these days I’m going to see you twisting around with colic and with a toad in your belly."
"Right here," he answered. "Waiting for my funeral procession to pass."
"That’s what happened," he admitted. And he explained in a tone of prostrated resignation: "I had to do it so that the animals would keep on breeding."
"Thifisif," she would say, "ifisif onefos ofosif thofosif whosufu cantantant statantand thefesef smufumellu ofosif therisir owfisown shifisifit."
"In spite of the visible hostility of the family, Fernanda did not give up her drive to impose the customs of her ancestors."
"But the custom was imposed, the same as that of reciting the rosary before dinner, and it drew the attention of the neighbors."
"The solemnity of an act which Úrsula had considered the most simple one of daily life created a tense atmosphere."
"Even Úrsula’s superstitions, with origins that came more from an inspiration of the moment than from tradition, came into conflict with those of Fernanda."
"She put an end to the custom of eating in the kitchen and whenever anyone was hungry, and she imposed the obligation of doing it at regular hours at the large table in the dining room, covered with a linen cloth and with silver candlesticks and table service."
"As long as Úrsula had full use of her faculties some of the old customs survived and the life of the family kept some quality of her impulsiveness."
"Colonel Aureliano Buendía became aware somehow of those changes and foresaw their consequences."
"At this rate we'll end up fighting against the Conservative regime again, but this time to install a king in its place."
"The business in pastries and small candy animals that Santa Sofía de la Piedad had kept up because of Úrsula’s wishes was considered an unworthy activity by Fernanda."
"The only serene corner had been established by peaceful West Indian Negroes, who built a marginal street with wooden houses on piles where they would sit in the doors at dusk singing melancholy hymns in their disordered gabble."
"It was such a tumultuous and intemperate invasion that during the first days it was impossible to walk through the streets because of the furniture and trunks."
"Men expert in the disturbances of love, experienced all over the world, stated that they had never suffered an anxiety similar to the one produced by the natural smell of Remedios the Beauty."
"She 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."
"What no member of the family ever knew was that the strangers did not take long to realize that Remedios the Beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still perceptible several hours after she had passed by."
"But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simplemindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long."
"Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone."
"Those were dark days for Colonel Aureliano Buendía."
"He even accused Father Antonio Isabel of complicity for having marked his sons with indelible ashes so that they could be identified by their enemies."
"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can."
"The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o'clock and the Conservatives at eight."
"The years nowadays don't pass the way the old ones used to."
"No one knew exactly when she had begun to lose her sight."
"The search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them."
"He had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride."
"The lowering of the image of her son brought out in her all at once all the compassion that she owed him."
"She had to make a great effort not to throw at them their prissiness, their poverty of spirit, their delusions of grandeur."
"Amaranta was startled by the obvious burden of hate that the declaration carried."