I recently bumped into some quotes I compiled from Living to Tell the Tale, a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez also posted a book review on the same last year and surprisingly forgot about the quotes, well till I found them. So, here are my best 11, enjoy 🙂
1. “What you need is a good woman.” For my brother Abelardo, there were no problems in life that could not be reserved in bed.
2. “If this bed were the academy and you were the student, I’d be number one not only in class but in the whole school,” An adolescence Gabriel to his cougar lover (who was a teacher by profession).
3. I do not know what in fact I learnt from my captivity in the Liceo Nacional (elementary school), but the four years of harmonious coexistence with everyone instilled a unitary vision of the nation in me. I discovered how diverse we were and what we were good for, and I learnt and never forgot that the entire country was in fact the sum total of each one of us.
4. Bored with studying, I left everything to the mercy of chance. The reality was that I did not understand why I had to sacrifice my talents and my time on courses that did not move me and therefore would be of no use to me in a life that was not mine.
5. “If poetry does not make my blood run faster, open sudden windows for me onto the mysterious, help me discover the world, accompany this desolate heart in solitude and in love, in joy and in enmity, what good is poetry to me?”—a poem by one of Gabriel’s acquaintances.
6. Stealing books is a crime but not a sin.
7. Today, trying to recount my past days, I do not find them in my recollection, and I have come to believe more in forgetting than in memory.
8. I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and the silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is headed.
9. In 1953, March 6 I would be twenty-seven years old. In the midst of the good wishes of my friends, I felt ready to devour raw the seventy-three I still had left before I celebrated the first hundred.
10. We did not use a tape recorder. They had just been invented and the best ones were as large and heavy as a typewriter, and the magnetic tape would tangle like angel-hair candy. Transcription alone was a great feat. Even today we know that recorders are very useful for remembering, but the face of the person interviewed must never be neglected, for it can say much more than the voice, and at times just the opposite.
11. There are books that do not belong to the person who writes them but to the one who suffers them, and this is one of them,” of his book, Memoirs of a Shipwrecked Sailor.
Black Roses 