...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.
Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to s...
You can't come in, colonel," she told him. "You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house.
But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.
Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.
Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.
Zijn goede bedoelingen werden gedwarsboomd door de onwankelbare starheid van Rebeca, die vele jaren van leed en ellende nodig had gehad om de voorrechten van de eenzaamheid te verkrijgen en die niet van plan was daarvan af te zien in ruil voor een ou...
It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that t...
Children inherit their parents' madness.
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 suffocating smell of blood.
Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.
He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.
That would be fine,” she said “If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.
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...
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. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that w...
There is always something left to love.
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 l...