Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” 

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” 

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” 

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” 

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.” 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 6 March 1927 - 17 April 2014

On Style: "In every book I try to make a different path [...]. One doesn't choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that and they see things I hadn't seen. I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean.

On Magical Realism: Literary critic Michael Bell proposes an alternative understanding for García Márquez's style, as the category magic realism is criticized for being dichotimizing and exoticizing, "what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimentally the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed." 

García Márquez and his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza discuss his work in a similar way, "'The way you treat reality in your books...has been called magical realism. I have the feeling your European readers are usually aware of the magic of your stories but fail to see the reality behind it...' 'This is surely because their rationalism prevents them seeing that reality isn't limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs.'"

On Solitude: In response to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza's question, "If solitude is the theme of all your books, where should we look for the roots of this over-riding emotion? In your childhood perhaps?" García Márquez replied, "I think it's a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it. The feeling pervades the work of so many writers, although some of them may express it unconsciously."

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Solitude of Latin America", he relates this theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

On Macondo: In his autobiography, García Márquez explains his fascination with the word and concept Macondo. He describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant...I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the Ceiba.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (wiki)

NYT

invent a god

Broken glittering glass edges reflecting an elegant universe magnified the tears of an Iraqi girl burying her parents in a white shroud of cloth, an old flag of final surrender.

Tree leaves blasted green to deep yellow and brown. They flew into a river. They gathered on boulders clogging the Rio Guadalete and dolomite waterfalls. One leaf could do a lot of damage. The river needed cleaning.

"See," said the Grand Inquisitor ringing his broken Spanish bell, "it’s all possible. Everything is permitted if there is no God."

"Let’s invent a God," said a pregnant nun supporting her nose habit. "We need reason and faith to believe in a higher power."

"Reason and faith are incompatible," said a logic board filled with circular flux reactors.

"Look," said Little Nino, "I found a compass and it works. The needle is pointing to magnetic north. This may help us. I am a compass without a needle."

Ahmed the Berber read the instructions. "Great Scott! It says one sharp line of description is better than any number of mundane observations."

"You don’t need a compass in the land of dreams," said a mother. "We need all the direction we can handle."

"Maybe one direction is enough," said a cartographer.

"If you need a helping hand," said a child, "look at the end of your wrist."

"O wise one, tell us another," cried a disembodied voice.

"Ok, how about this," a child said. "Our days of instant gratification are a thing of the past."

"Looks like everything is a thing of the past," observed a child sifting dust particles at Ground Earth on 9/11.

"You’re wiser than your years."

"That’s an old saw with a rusty blade cutting through desire, anger, greed, ignorance and suffering."

"Yes," said a child, "there are two kinds of suffering."

"What are they?" asked another orphan.

"There’s suffering you run away from and suffering you face,” said a child arranging leaves on blank pages inside her black book.

A Century is Nothing

talk to me

A young girl wore a permanent tear on her left cheek. She was not smiling. Her t-shirt had a picture of a skull and bones.

Danger! LAND MINES!

She said: Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture? I don’t know how to read so I like to look at pictures. Mycountry has 14.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million land mines.

Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don’t have medical facilities. Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground.

I’m really good at numbers.

26,000 men, women and children are maimed or killed every year in the world by land mines leftover from ongoing or forgotten conflicts. Reports from the killing fields indicate there are 110 million land mines buried in 45 countries.

It will cost $33 billion to remove them and take 1,100 years. Governments spend $200-$300 million a year to detect and remove 10,000. Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the most heavily mined countries in the world.

40 percent of Cambodian land is unused because of land mines. One in 236 Cambodians are amputees. A prosthetic limb costs $3,000.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places. I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn’t like it. They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. He’s seen too much horror and death in one life. So it goes. My village is my world. Where do you live?

echo

New music echoed. Everyone ran to a window. 

Across the street an Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three story building. It towered above a gated Jakarta community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees, displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yo-yo’s and orphans sleeping on broken bamboo bed springs or swimming to Cambodia through flooded dreams. 

In his left hand he held a shining silver chisel. In his right, a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between the Stone Algae and the Iron Algae.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. His chorale was a tribal creation song remembering family and soft rice paddies feeling wind carry his song.

A Cambodian slave girl in the background using a brothel broom of thinned tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm. She created her symphony of sadness and neglect waiting to be abandoned like a manuscript.