212 quotes found
“I am condemned to a theatrical destiny.”
“...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.”
“Take care,' said Delaura. 'Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.''Saint Thomas said it, and I wi...”
“The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lu...”
“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.”
“It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people...”
“Her movements were so stealthy that she seemed to be an invisible creature. Frightened by her strange nature, her mother had hung a cowbell around the girl's wrist so she would not lose track of he...”
“literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.”
“Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.”
“She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with ...”
“The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart.”
“For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a...”
“The worst way to miss someone is to have them sitting right next to you and know you can never have them.”
“The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving th...”
“A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary t...”
“Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.”
“Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I disc...”
“I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just t...”
“Shame has poor memory.”
“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.”
