One Hundred Years of Solitude

"It was as if time had advanced backward."

"Wars are always the same."

"He awoke at three in the morning, alarmed by the silence."

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

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

"He closed his eyes and allowed himself to be pulled along by time."

"The world was magical and mechanical at the same time."

"She understood that men were not as indispensable as she had once believed."

"One should not confuse defeat with truth."

"The Buendías were not capable of love."

"She did not weep because she was alone; she wept because someone had stopped loving her."

"Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble."

"He had lost not only his reason but also the ability to remember his passion."

"The rain would last for eleven months and eleven days."

"They were never to be together again."

"In her final years she came to take on an abstract quality, as though she were a living metaphor for human capacity for denial."

"The past was always being renewed and improved in memory."

"Wherever they go, whatever they do, they will carry Macondo within them."

"She put her hand on my chest and felt my heart."

"I learned that the world was round, like an orange, and most important of all, that it had nothing to do with the place where I lived."

"The beauty of this discovery paled before the austere reality of her oblivion."

"He had not had a single moment of peace since they had closed the shop."

"Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but for obscuring it."

"It was though the world had been washed clean."

"They were doomed to repeat the same line, generation after generation, forever and ever."

"The only real thing is friendship."

"Age was something that did not exist in Macondo."

"He loved her without knowing how, without knowing why."