He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
He who awaits much can expect little.
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.
In the end all books are written for your friends.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
She was lost in her longing to understand.
He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.
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.
A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.
What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.
The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.
The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.
While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person.
Justice limps along, but gets there all the same.
If men gave birth, they’d be less inconsiderate.
Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. ‘Forever,’ he said.
The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
Hate and love are reciprocal passions.
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.