Here are the best phrases from Love in the Times of Cholera (in order of appearance), a novel by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1985. The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship flourishes between the two with the help of Fermina's Aunt.
They exchange several love letters. However, once Fermina's father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the relationship, she forces her daughter to stop seeing Florentino immediately.
When she refuses, father and daughter move with their late wife's family to another city. Regardless of the distance, Fermina and Florentino continue to communicate by telegraph.
However, on her return, Fermina realizes that her relationship with Florentino was nothing more than a dream, since they are practically unknown; breaks her engagement with Florentino and throws all her letters.
When Fermina decides to marry a rich doctor from a good family, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. Fermina's husband dies, and Florentino deliberately attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months and four days after declaring her love for Fermina, she will do it again.
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1-It was inevitable: the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of disappointed loves.
2-He found the corpse covered with a blanket in the camp bed where he had always slept, near a stool with the bucket that had served to vaporize the poison.
3-A police commissioner had come forward with a very young medical student who was doing his forensic practice at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while Dr. Urbino arrived.
4-I will have plenty of time to rest when I die but this eventuality is not yet in my projects.
5-The instructions to the commissioner and the practitioner were precise and fast. There was no autopsy to be done.
6-You will not miss here some crazy love that gives you the opportunity one of these days.
7-When you find it, take a good look, "he said to the practitioner," they usually have sand in their hearts.
8-Remotas, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the cathedral were heard calling for the high mass.
9 "If it had been a crime, there would be a good clue here," he told himself. I only know one man capable of composing this master ambush.
10-It was a half-truth, but they believed it to be complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tile from the floor and there they found a very used account book containing the keys to open the safe.
11-He got up with the first roosters, and at that time he began to take his secret medicines…
12-Despite his age, he was reluctant to receive patients in the office, and continued to treat them at home, as he always did, since the city was so domestic that he could walk anywhere.
13-Although he refused to retire, he was aware that they only called him to attend to lost cases, but he considered that this was also a form of specialization.
14-In any case - he used to say in class - the little medicine that is known is only known by some doctors.
15-The mood of the sky had begun to decompose very early, and it was cloudy and cool, but there was no risk of rain before noon.
16-In addition, the clandestinity shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which more than once they knew the instant explosion of happiness, did not seem an undesirable condition.
17- "I will never be old." She interpreted it as a heroic purpose to fight relentlessly against the ravages of time, but he was more explicit: he had an irrevocable determination to take his own life at sixty.
18-And he was glad, because he preferred to continue evoking the dead lover as he had asked him the night before, when he interrupted the letter that had already begun and looked at her for the last time.
19-The fact that the parrot had maintained its privileges after that historical outrage had been the final test of its sacred jurisdiction.
20-It was one of the good ones, lighter than it looked, and with a yellow head and black tongue, the only way to distinguish it from mangrove parrots that did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories.
21-Another very different thing would have been life for both of them, had they known in time that it was easier to overcome the great marital catastrophes than the tiny miseries of each day.
22-It was hot like a ship's boiler, because they had had to close the windows to prevent the rain from getting biased by the wind.
23-Relieved by one more victory over old age, he abandoned himself to the diaphanous and fluid lyricism of the last piece of the program, which he could not identify.
24-By pure experience, although without scientific foundation, Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew that most mortal diseases had their own smell, but none was as specific as that of old age.
25-In any case, the tragedy was a commotion not only among its people, but it affected the common people by contagion, who appeared on the streets with the illusion of knowing even the glow of the legend.
26-The night of Dr. Urbino's death, he was dressed as the news surprised him, which was how he always was despite the infernal heat of June…
27-However, he managed to learn that Fermina Daza had been invited to a Saturday dance a few days after her arrival, and that her father had not allowed her to attend with a final phrase: "Everything will be done in due time."
28-Take advantage now that you are young to suffer as much as you can -he told her-, these things do not last a lifetime.
29-It was the year of the fierce infatuation. Neither one nor the other had a life for anything other than thinking about the other, to dream of the other, to await the letters with as much anxiety as they were answered.
30-Reading became an insatiable vice. Since he taught him to read, his mother bought him picture books by Nordic authors, which were sold as children's stories…
31-He tried to seduce her with all kinds of flattery. He tried to make her understand that love at her age was a mirage, he tried to convince her the good way to return the letters and go back to school to apologize on her knees…
32-The rest of the day was like a hallucination, in the same house where she had been until yesterday, receiving the same visitors that had fired her, talking about the same thing, and stunned by the impression of living a piece of life again already lived.
33-He followed her without being seen, discovering the daily gestures, the grace, the premature maturity of the being he loved most in the world and whom he saw for the first time in his natural state.
34-He liked to say that that love had been the fruit of a clinical mistake.
35-Cholera became an obsession. He did not know much more about him than he had routinely learned in some fringe course, and it had seemed implausible to him that only thirty years earlier he had caused more than 140,000 deaths in France, including Paris.
36-The bandage brought out the purity of his lips between the round black beard and the sharp-tipped mustaches, and she was shaken by a flash of panic.
37-She knew that she was going to get married the following Saturday, in a noisy wedding, and the being who loved her the most and was to love her forever would not even have the right to die for her.
38-He took her hand, cold and twitching with terror, intertwined his fingers, and almost with a whisper began to tell her memories of other sea voyages.
39-Thus, among the anchors of Neapolitan operas and serenades, his creative talent and his invincible entrepreneurial spirit made him the hero of river navigation in its heyday.
40-The lighthouse tower was always a lucky refuge that he evoked with nostalgia when he had everything resolved at the dawn of old age…
41-It was the mistake of his life, just as his conscience was going to remind him every hour of every day, until the last day.
42-It was already late: the occasion was with her on the mule tram, she had always been with her in the same chair she was sitting in, but now she was gone forever.
43-When he realized that he had begun to love her, she was already in her prime of forty, and he was about to turn thirty.
44-In the repairing leisure of solitude, on the other hand, widows discovered that the honest way of living was at the mercy of the body…
45-The most absurd thing about the situation of both was that they never seemed so happy in public as in those years of misfortune.
46-However, when he thought he was completely erased from memory, he reappeared where he least expected it, turned into a ghost of his nostalgia.
47-The truth is that smell was not only used to wash clothes or to find lost children: it was his sense of direction in all orders of life, and especially of social life.
48-So love affairs became impossible when the car became too noticeable at the door, and after three months they were nothing more than ridiculous.
49-However, very soon he was going to learn that this excessive determination was not so much the fruit of resentment as of nostalgia.
50-That was how he found himself when he least thought about it in the sanctuary of a love that was extinguished before he was born.
51-Most of the partners took those disputes as marital lawsuits, in which both parties are right.
52-The persistence of his memory increased his anger. When she awoke thinking about him, the day after the funeral, she managed to remove him from her memory with a simple gesture of her will.
53 "Death has no sense of ridicule," he said, adding sadly, "especially at our age."
54-He had the good sense not to wait for an immediate answer, since it was enough for him that the letter was not returned.
55-It was a forbidden word: before. She felt the chimerical angel of the past pass by, and tried to evade it.
56-The roles were reversed. So it was she who tried to give him new courage to see the future, with a phrase that he, in his reckless haste, could not decipher: Let time pass and we will see what it brings.
57-The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
58-Both went to sleep when the music ended, after a long conversation without stumbling in the dark gazebo.
59-It always happened to him the first time, with all of them, since always, so he had learned to live with that ghost: each time he had had to learn again, as if it were the first.
60-Florentino Ariza had the answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. -Lifetime
61-Love of the soul from the waist up and love of the body from the waist down.
62-And he looked at her for the last time forever and ever with the brightest, saddest and most grateful eyes that she had never seen in half a century of life together, and managed to tell her with his last breath: -Only God knows how much I loved you.
63-He was scared by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
64-At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by some thin threads that could be broken without pain with a simple change of position during sleep…
65-Wisdom comes to us when it is no longer useful for anything.
66-The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and you have to rebuild it every morning before breakfast.
67-The memory of the heart eliminates bad memories and magnifies the good ones, and that thanks to that gadget we can cope with the past.
68-The only thing that hurts me to die, is that it is not from love.
69-I was still too young to know that the memory of the heart eliminates the bad memories and magnifies the good ones, and that thanks to that artifice we can cope with the past.
70-I will have time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet in my projects.
71-Death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always felt, but an immediate reality.
72-They were people with slow lives, who were not seen becoming old, or getting sick or dying, but were gradually fading in their time, becoming memories, mists of another era, until they were assimilated by oblivion.
73-The hiding shared with a man who was never completely his, and in which more than once they knew the instant explosion of happiness, did not seem an undesirable condition.
74-The old, among old, are less old.
75-Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness but stability.
76-He taught him the only thing he had to learn for love: that nobody teaches life.
77-But I knew, more by lesson than by experience, that such an easy happiness could not last long.
78-I had to teach him to think of love as a state of grace that was not a means to anything, but an origin and an end in itself.
79-Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.
80-The people you love should die with all their things.
81-You can be in love with several people at the same time, and all with the same pain, without betraying any.
82-The fact that someone does not love you as you want, does not mean that he does not love you with all his being.