Top 250 Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

102. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

104. “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

105. “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

106. “It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

107. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

109. “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

110. “We’ll grow old waiting.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

111. “In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

113. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

115. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

119. “One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

124. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

126. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

128. “It is easier to start a war than to end it.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

138. “I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

140. “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

141. “Fame is very agreeable, but the bad thing is that it goes on 24 hours a day.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

142. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

144. “Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

146. “The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

147. “Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

148. “La fatalidad nos hace invisibles.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

149. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

150. “The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez