One Hundred Years of Solitude

"The most terrifying spectacle in nature was the appearance of the aurora with an extraordinary light."

"She discovered the hidden power of words and the difficulty of explaining them to others."

"In every woman there lives a man who once loved her."

"Everything was written to be forgotten."

"The butterfly that had visited them in those early days had long since transformed into dust."

"It was as if an instinctive loyalty had awakened him to the reality of his loss."

"The dead go back to the roots when the world begins."

"Without knowing why, she felt that she had been transformed into something like crystal."

"To be born is already in itself a form of death."

"It was as if a plague of forgetting had touched the town with its brush."

"Men have taken flight, for they are made of air."

"She had read her fill of tragic novels and she was confident that passion would overcome every obstacle."

"The cruelest of all losses is the loss of friendship."

"She would discover that trying to maintain a house became harder the older she got."

"Time was not passing, as it might have in the outside world, but instead was turning in a circle."

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

"He was still in the midst of his labyrinthine mental wanderings when Remedios the Beauty began to rise."

"She had discovered that it was impossible to love without dying."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a complete negation of it."

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

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

"We are all strangers in the land of our own childhood."

"The river of time flows backward in Macondo, returning us to our origins."

"A man's work is his monument, whether he builds or destroys."

"Distance is not measured in miles but in the depth of forgetting."

"The wheel turns, but we remain fixed in the center of our own universe."

"Magic is merely the world's true nature revealed."

"Some secrets are too dangerous to be spoken aloud."