Here are the best phrases from One Hundred Years of Solitude (in order of appearance), a novel published in 1967 by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.
It is one of the most representative works of magical realism. Following its publication, it has been translated into more than 37 languages and has sold more than 37 million copies. You may also be interested in these phrases by Gabriel García Márquez or these from famous writers.
1-The world was so recent, that many things lacked a name, and to mention them you had to point at them with your finger.
2-It is proven that the devil has sulfuric properties, and this is nothing more than a little suleiman.
3-The essential thing is not to lose orientation. Always aware of the compass, he continued to guide his men towards the invisible north, until they managed to leave the enchanted region.
4-We still don't have a dead man. You are from nowhere as long as you do not have a dead person underground.
5-It was a good June night, cool and moonlit, and they were awake and frolicking in bed until dawn, indifferent to the wind that passed through the bedroom, loaded with the cry of Prudencio Aguilar's relatives.
6-He asked what city that was, and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, which had no meaning whatsoever, but which had a supernatural resonance in the dream: Macondo.
7-He promised to follow her to the end of the world, but later, when he settled his affairs, and she had gotten tired of waiting for him, always identifying him with tall and short men, blond and brown…
8-I was among the crowd that witnessed the sad spectacle of the man who became a viper for disobeying his parents.
9-Fascinated by an immediate reality that at the time was more fantastic than the vast universe of his imagination, he lost all interest in the alchemy laboratory…
10-Adolescence had taken away the sweetness of his voice and had made him silent and definitely lonely, but instead it had restored the intense expression that he had in the years at birth.
11-In all the houses, keys had been written to memorize objects and feelings But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality…
12-Time appeased his reckless purpose, but aggravated his feeling of frustration.
13-Then he took out the money accumulated in long years of hard work, acquired commitments with his clients, and undertook the expansion of the house.
14-On that he lived. He had circled the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a crew of stateless sailors.
15-She was so impressed by his enormous tarabiscote nudity that she felt the urge to back away.
16-A pistol shot was fired in the chest and the projectile came out of his back without hurting any vital center. The only thing that remained of all that was a street with his name in Macondo.
17-They were images of lovers in lonely parks, with vignettes of arrowed hearts and golden ribbons held by doves.
18-The war, which until then had been nothing more than a word to designate a vague and remote circumstance, was arranged in a dramatic reality.
19-Actually he did not care about death, but life, and that is why the sensation he experienced when they pronounced the sentence was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.
20-Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared, and he saw himself again, very young, with shorts and a bow around his neck, and he saw his father on a splendid afternoon leading him into the tent, and he saw the ice.
21-They promised to establish a breeding ground for magnificent animals, not so much to enjoy victories that then they would not need, but to have something with which to distract themselves on the tedious Sundays of death.
22-So many flowers fell from the sky that the streets woke up covered with a compact quilt, and they had to clear them with shovels and rakes so that the funeral could pass.
23-His head, now with deep entrances, seemed to be simmered. Her face cracked by Caribbean salt had taken on a metallic hardness. It was preserved against impending old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of the innards.
24-But do not forget that as long as God gives us life, we will continue to be mothers, and no matter how revolutionary they are, we have the right to lower their pants and give them a skin at the first lack of respect.
25-When the blue misty air came out, his face became damp as in another dawn of the past, and only then did he understand why he had ordered that the sentence be carried out in the courtyard, and not on the cemetery wall.
26-He ended up losing all contact with the war. What was once a real activity, an irresistible passion of his youth, became for him a remote reference: a void.
27-Only he knew then that his stunned heart was forever doomed to uncertainty.
28-The intoxication of power began to decompose in bursts of unease.
29-But when the proximity of the armistice was known and it was thought that he was returning again as a human being, finally rescued for the hearts of his loved ones, the family affections that had been dormant for so long were reborn with more strength than ever.
30-In an instant he discovered the scratches, welts, bruises, ulcers and scars that more than half a century of daily life had left on her, and he verified that these ravages did not arouse in him even a feeling of pity. Then she made one last effort to search her heart for the place where her affections had rotted, and she could not find it.
31-Shortly after, when his personal doctor finished removing the glondrines, he asked him without showing particular interest what the exact site of the heart was. The doctor listened to him and then painted a circle on his chest with a cotton ball soiled with iodine.
32-Although after so many years of war they must have seemed familiar to him, this time he experienced the same discouragement in his knees, and the same shimmering of the skin that he had experienced in his youth in the presence of a naked woman.
33-What happens is that the world is ending little by little and those things no longer come.
34-No one should know its meaning until they have reached one hundred years.
35-Like all the good things that happened to them in their long lives, that unbridled fortune had its origin in chance.
36-He was exasperated by his coffee mugs at five o'clock, the disorder in his workshop, his frayed blanket and his habit of sitting in the doorway at sunset.
37-Too late I convince myself that I would have done you a great favor if I had let you shoot.
38-The innocent yellow train that so many uncertainties and evidences, and so many flatteries and misadventures, and so many changes, calamities and nostalgia had to bring to Macondo.
39-The amazing thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she got rid of fashion seeking comfort, the more disturbing her incredible beauty was and the more provocative her behavior with men.
40-Open your eyes wide. With any of them, the children will come out with a pig's tail.
41-The only current difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals go to mass at five and conservatives go to mass at eight.
42-It was then that it occurred to him that his clumsiness was not the first victory of decrepitude and darkness, but a failure of time.
43-The prestige of his unbridled voraciousness, of his immense capacity for waste, of his unprecedented hospitality, exceeded the limits of the swamp and attracted the best qualified gluttons of the coast.
44-Life was going to embroider the shroud. It would have been said that he embroidered during the day and overflowed at night, and not with the hope of defeating loneliness in that way, but quite the opposite, to sustain it.
45-She drew up the plan with such hatred that she was shocked by the idea that she would have done it the same way if it had been with love, but she did not let herself be stunned by confusion, but continued to refine the details so thoroughly that it became more than a specialist, a virtuoso in the rites of death.
46-The world was reduced on the surface of his skin, and the interior was safe from all bitterness.
47-It rained four years, eleven months and two days. There were times of drizzle when everyone put on their pontifical clothes and made up a convalescent face to celebrate the scaling, but they soon got used to interpreting the pauses as announcements of a recrudescence.
48-The jets of sad water that fell on the coffin were soaking up the flag that had been placed on it, and that was actually the flag dirty with blood and gunpowder, repudiated by the most worthy veterans.
49-The spirit of her invincible heart guided her in the darkness. Those who noticed her stumbling and stumbled on her archangelic arm always raised at the height of the head, thought that she could hardly handle her body, but they still did not believe that she was blind.
50-In his last years it occurred to them to substitute the numbers for riddles, so that the prize would be distributed among all what they got right, but the system turned out to be so complicated and lent itself to so many suspicions, that they gave up on the second attempt.
51-The last time they had helped her to calculate her age, at the time of the banana company, she had calculated it between one hundred and fifteen and one hundred and twenty-two years of age.
52-Actually, her pernicious habit of not calling things by their name had given rise to a new confusion, since the only thing that telepathic surgeons found was a descent of the uterus that could be corrected with the use of a pessary.
53-In the last minute riot, the drunks who took them out of the house confused the coffins and buried them in the wrong graves.
54-More than a bookstore, that one looked like a dump of used books, put in disorder on the shelves that must have been destined for the corridors.
55-Years earlier, when he turned one hundred and forty-five, he had given up the pernicious habit of keeping track of his age, and continued to live in the static and marginal time of memories, in a perfectly revealed and established future, beyond of futures disturbed by the lurks and insidious assumptions of the decks.
56-The people had reached such extremes of inactivity, that when Gabriel won the contest and went to Paris with two changes of clothes, a pair of shoes and the complete works of Rabelais, he had to signal to the engineer so that the train stop to pick it up.
57-One night they smeared themselves from head to toe with syrup peaches, licked each other like dogs and loved each other like crazy on the floor of the corridor, and they were awakened by a torrent of meat ants that were preparing to devour them alive.
58-I had seen them as they passed by, sitting in the rooms with their gaze absorbed and their arms crossed, feeling a whole time go by, a time without breaking down, because it was useless to divide it into months and years, and the days into hours, when I could not do nothing but watch the rain.
59-He dug so deeply into her feelings that looking for interest he found love, because trying to make her love him he ended up loving her.
60-The search for lost things is hampered by routine habits, and that is why it takes so much work to find them.
61-She drew up the plan with so much hatred that she was shocked by the idea that she would have done it the same way if it had been with love.
62-It had not occurred to him until then that literature was the best toy that had been invented to make fun of people.
63-It had taken many years of suffering and misery to conquer the privileges of solitude, and I was not willing to renounce them in exchange for an old age disturbed by the false charms of mercy.
64-She had lost the strength of her thighs, the hardness of her breasts, the habit of tenderness, but she kept intact the madness of her heart.
65-I did not understand how you got to the extreme of making a war for things that could not be touched with your hands.
66-Loneliness had selected his memories, and had incinerated the numbing heaps of nostalgic garbage that life had accumulated in his heart, and had purified, magnified and eternalized the others, the most bitter.
67-He had had to promote thirty-two wars, and violate all his pacts with death and wallow like a pig in the dunghill of glory, to discover with almost forty years of delay the privileges of simplicity.