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.
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.
The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.
Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.
Children’s lies are signs of great talent.
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.
Nobody teaches life anything.
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.
I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.