Gabriel García Márquez (Narrator)

"The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

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

"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."

"The only concrete thing left of the past was the orange tree."

"It was as if time had advanced backward."

"She had penetrated the labyrinth of certainties of an unbridled woman and had emerged unscathed."

"He understood then that he had been beaten not by his enemy but by time."

"The most fragrant woman ever to have existed was Remedios the Beauty."

"Memory of the past is a mirror that faces an abyss."

"Macondo was painted yellow."

"They did not know where they were going, nor did they know what they sought."

"The past was still liquid, still capable of changing."

"He had not understood that love was a shared illusion."

"The dead did not leave because they wanted to, but because they were made to leave."

"They were condemned to one hundred years of solitude."

"It was a Friday when the rains began."

"She understood finally that the deciphering of infinite space could not be found in the stars."

"He perceived something irreversible in time."

"The yellow pages were indecipherable until the very last."

"Love was an apparition passing through a mirror."

"Nobody would leave Macondo by way of the river, for it had turned into blood."

"They bore the weight of the most difficult science: the science of missing someone."

"The house was large and cool and filled with the smell of bitter almonds."

"He had loved her because he could not bear her absence."

"The truth is that Macondo was not the town of ghosts it had become."

"They were condemned to repeat everything forever."

"The imagination was more important than the land itself."

"She had given up the fight against her nature."

"He was condemned to wander the earth seeking a sign."

"The only real thing was the forgetting."