1. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.”
2. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
3. “In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.”
4. “[Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s] orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
5. “Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
6. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”
7. “…he considered respect for one’s given word as a wealth that should not be squandered.”
8. “If you don’t fear God, fear him through the metals.”
9. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
10. “There is always something left to love.”
11. “Pietro Crespi took the sewing basket from her lap and he told her, “We’ll get married next month.” Amaranta did not tremble at the contact with his icy hands. She withdrew hers like a timid little animal and went back to her work. “Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”
12. “He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
13. “The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past.”
14. “More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”
15. “because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”
16. “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
17. “But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simple-mindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long.”
18. “Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. ”
19. “He wasn’t only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of 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.”
20. “The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”
21. “If they believe it in the Bible, I don’t see why they shouldn’t believe it from me.”
22. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
23. “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
24. “From being used so much, kneaded with sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud.”
25. “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.”
26. “He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta.”
27. “she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms”
28. “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.”
29. “Nothing made him desist except his own lamentable state of demoralization.”
30. “The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.”
31. “And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened.”
32. “Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
33. “If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!” Ursula shouted.”
34. “[B]ut what pained her most and enraged her most and made her most bitter was the fragrant and wormy guava grove of love that was dragging her toward death. Just as Colonel Aureliano Buendía thought about his war, unable to avoid it, so Amaranta thought about Rebeca. But while her brother had managed to sterilize his memories, she had only managed to make hers more scalding.”
35. “Finally in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”
36. “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.”
37. “Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.”
38. “Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”
39. “We’ll turn to ashes in this house without men, but. we won’t give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing us weep”
40. “The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother José Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity.”
41. “… that the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth…”
42. “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…”
43. “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
44. “She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”
45. “They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.”
46. “He succeeded in having Macondo raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past.”
47. “Arcadio was a solitary and frightened child during the insomnia plague, in the midst of Úrsula’s utilitarian fervor, during the delirium of José Arcadio Buendía, the hermetism of Aureliano, and the mortal rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca. Aureliano had taught him to read and write, thinking about other things, as he would have done with a stranger.”
48. “…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle…”
49. “When the war was over, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía was sneaking about through the narrow trails of permanent subversion, General Moncada was named magistrate of Macondo. He wore civilian clothes, replaced the soldiers with unarmed policemen, enforced the amnesty laws, and helped a few families of Liberals who had been killed in the war.”
50. “Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”
51. “They went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of crack ”
52. “Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blocks of daily reality without strain, fell apart apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years echoed her.”
53. “The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.”
54. “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.”
55. “He would spend the day in the rear of the store writing wild notes, which he would send to Amaranta with flower petals and dried butterflies, and which she would return onepened.”
56. “Intrigued by that enigma, 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.”
57. “An artisan without memories, whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes.”
58. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…”
59. “They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
60. “Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mother gives birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
61. “Love is a disease.”
62. “The world must be all fucked up,’ he said then, ‘when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.’ That was the last thing he was heard to say.”
63. “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.”
64. “But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Úrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. […] He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia.”
65. “The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end.”
66. “The foreigners who heard the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated with that secret perfume, and then they understood that the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones.”
67. “Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
68. “The rain would not have bothered Fernanda, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it were raining.”
69. “A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.”
70. “One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!.”
71. “both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained.”
72. “he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand”
73. “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alteration between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.”