One Hundred Years of Solitude

"The past is packed with ought-to-bes; the future with mere maybes."

"One must endure the most unbearable circumstances without the aid of hope."

"Life itself is the most important thing, not understanding life."

"No matter how strong you are, you cannot live without loving or being loved."

"She had discovered that it was impossible to return to the past."

"The only thing they left behind was a wake of ghost footprints in the room."

"It was as if God had decided to test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alteration between doubt and revelation, 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."

"The solitude of the living was a different kind of solitude than that of the dead"

"Everything written is irrevocable and repetitive"

"The final pages were suddenly revealed"

"She bore her suffering with a grace that bordered on holiness"

"The pendulum of the clock seemed to measure not time but eternity"

"Love was a temporary illusion that came and went without warning"

"He possessed a supernatural ability to forget the past"

"The town had been built in a forgotten corner of the map"

"She understood that she was not being loved for her beauty alone"

"Every plague brings with it a sense of predestination"

"The house was still there, exact and solitary"

"He had spent so much time looking at the future that he forgot to look at the past"

"The plague of insomnia was spreading throughout the town"

"One could hear the whisper of the wind and the faint music from the nearby town"

"She loved him not for what he was, but for what he meant"

"Colonel Aureliano Buendía forgot the Spanish language of his childhood"

"The gypsies returned with all their machines"

"Macondo had become a powerful city"

"The smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fatal scent of beauty"

"There were seventeen Aurelianos and all of them had an identical destiny"

"She had accepted her fate with a resignation that was almost supernatural"