Gabriel García Márquez (Narrator)

"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 alternation between doubt and revelation."

"He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude."

"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude."

"She had discovered that it was impossible to love the same person twice."

"They really had been through death, but they had returned."

"The past was like a living thing, solid and unmovable."

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment."

"She had never known beauty until she understood solitude."

"Memory does not know how to distinguish between the truth and the invented."

"One can bear any sorrow without pity."

"They were covered with a tender, transparent skin, as if they were newborns."

"Love was an unknown passion that had not yet entered the world."

"Remedios the Beauty had found a way to ascend."

"The ice that Melquiades had brought to Macondo seemed eternal."

"He had the look of someone who has been in solitude too long."

"The banana company brought strange customs and stranger people."

"Fortune did not smile on Aureliano Segundo's efforts."

"The house was full of the smell of dried flowers."

"The heat was unbearable and the dust never stopped falling."

"There is no past that does not return."

"She smiled with a certain malice."

"The world was so recent that many things lacked names."

"The civil wars seemed to never end."

"She was not a person but a remedy for loneliness."

"Melquiades had written everything with the clarity of nostalgia."

"He was a man of obsessive dedication."

"The rains lasted nearly five years."

"They felt themselves dissolved in their own existence."

"The porch was lit by the glow of the stars."

"She had exhausted all her years in that single instant."