Top 250 Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

102. “This soup tastes like windows.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

104. “And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

105. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

106. “The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

107. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

108. “At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

109. “As a writer I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

110. “It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

111. “Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

112. “Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

113. “One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

114. “He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

115. “She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

116. “People spend a lifetime thinking abouthow 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. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

117. “Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

118. “The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

119. “There 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

120. “Inspiration gives no warnings.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

121. “We’ll grow old waiting.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

122. “No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

123. “Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

124. “She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

125. “It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. 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 in itself.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

126. “For a week I did not take off my mechanic’s coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I’d never had anyone to do that for.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

127. “She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

128. “He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

129. “More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

130. “I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

131. “There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

132. “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

133. “Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

135. “Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

136. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

138. “It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

139. “The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

140. “The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

141. “He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

142. “Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

143. “Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

144. “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of Him.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

145. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

146. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

147. “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

148. “Necessity has the face of a dog.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

149. “Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

150. “Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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