Top 250 Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

202. “There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

203. “Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

204. “In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

205. “A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

207. “She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

208. “Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

209. “I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

210. “He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

211. “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

212. “The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

213. “She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

214. “What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew’s courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

215. “Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

216. “Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

217. “Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

218. “Si vas a volverte loco, vuelve te solo.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

219. “If men gave birth, they’d be less inconsiderate.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

220. “I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

221. “If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it’s different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they’re very cocky.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

222. “The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

223. “Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

224. “The fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

225. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

226. “My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. Because in the world that I was trying to evoke, that barrier didn’t exist.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

227. “In the end all books are written for your friends.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

228. “Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

229. “There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

230. “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.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

231. “Children’s lies are signs of great talent.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

232. “Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

233. “Fame invades your private life. It takes away from the time that you spend with friends, and the time that you can work. It tends to isolate you from the real world.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

234. “I think that the idea that I’m writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There’s even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

235. “He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

237. “What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

238. “In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

239. “Tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

240. “I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

241. “Old people, with other old people, are not so old.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

242. “This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

243. “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

244. “He governed as if he felt predestined to never die.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

245. “One had to live a long time to know a man’s true nature.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

246. “The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

247. “That’s maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

248. “I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

249. “In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

250. “It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.”

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez