Gabriel García Márquez (Narrator)

"Health is a luxury few can afford."

"Music is the language of angels."

"Peace can only be found within oneself."

"Nature always has the final word."

"Work without meaning is merely torture."

"Perseverance is the victory of the determined."

"Inspiration comes to those who seek it."

"Relationships are the chains that bind us to existence."

"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 test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between doubt and revelation."

"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."

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

"She had discovered that she was not able to love without promises."

"He shrugged as if to say that the difference between disaster and revelation, between the miraculous and the commonplace, was only a matter of geography."

"Aureliano Buendía was to remember that his father showed him the marvels of the world in order that he would not be surprised by its lack of marvels."

"The most bitter smile in the world was the smile of the dead."

"Time advances in the same way for a fast-moving ant as for a sedentary being."

"The past was a material thing made of blocks that could be touched and examined in space."

"Love had never been a more concrete and more treacherous thing than it was then."

"She understood that all the confusion of her life had finally cleared up."

"Whenever he found himself in difficult situations, he would remember the taste of the soap of his childhood."

"In his own way, Aureliano Segundo was quite lucid in matters of the heart."

"The truth is that Macondo had not always been fated for this end."

"She was the most beautiful woman ever born in Macondo."

"Remedios the Beauty had finally managed to achieve perfection through her absolute lack of understanding."

"She was buried beneath a sheet of flowers as though she were a saint."

"Without noticing it, they had long since lost the habit of talking."

"In matters of the heart, it is better to arrive anywhere than nowhere."

"The world must have been designed by a practical man, not an idealist."

"Some individuals are born infected with the germ of oblivion."