Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
Gabriel García Márquez started as a journalist and gained fame for his magical realist novels like “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. His works, often set in the fictional Macondo, explored solitude and achieved immense critical and commercial success. He’s considered the most translated Spanish-language author and was hailed as “the greatest Colombian who ever lived” upon his death.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes
1. “Only God knows how much I love you.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
2. “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
3. “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
4. “Never stop smiling not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
5. “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
6. “No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you’ve already had.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
7. “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
8. “Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
9. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
10. “There is no greater glory than to die for love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
11. “No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
12. “There is always something left to love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
13. “Don’t struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
14. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
15. “Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
16. “The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
17. “El secreto de una buena vejez no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
18. “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.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
19. “A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
20. “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
21. “Do not allow me to forget you.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
22. “Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
23. “It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
24. “If you love something – let. If it is yours – it will come back. I love you not because of who you are, but for who I am when I’m with you.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
25. “No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
26. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
27. “Be calm. God awaits you at the door.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
28. “Sex is one’s consolation when love is not enough.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
29. “Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
30. “Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
31. “Morality, too, is a question of time.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
32. “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
33. “To oppression, plundering, and abandonment, we respond with life.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
34. “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
35. “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale…”
— Gabriel García Márquez
36. “Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
37. “I have never done anything except write, but I don’t possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
38. “You can’t eat hope,? the woman said. You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,? the colonel replied.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
39. “Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
40. “If God hadn’t rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
41. “Cease, cows, life is short.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
42. “I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
43. “They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
44. “Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
45. “For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
46. “She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she’ll be sorry if she isn’t guided by her heart.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
47. “He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
48. “Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams…”
— Gabriel García Márquez
49. “I think just the opposite is true: love is an ideology for eternal militants, and the more misfortunes life tries to burden us with, the more essential love becomes.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
50. “Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
51. “Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
52. “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .”
— Gabriel García Márquez
53. “Shame has poor memory.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
54. “Nobody is worth crying for, and those that are worth it will not make you cry.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
55. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”
— Gabriel García Márquez
56. “The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
57. “When one reaches absolute power, one loses total contact with reality.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
58. “Music is important for one’s health.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
59. “It’s much more important to write than to be written about.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
60. “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph, and once I get it, the rest just comes out very easily.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
61. “How strange women are.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
62. “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
63. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
64. “A man only has the right to look down at another when he helps him to lift himself up.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
65. “A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
66. “A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
67. “He who awaits much can expect little.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
68. “Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
69. “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
70. “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
71. “Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
72. “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
73. “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
74. “Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
75. “It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
76. “He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
77. “Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
78. “He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
79. “Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
80. “Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
81. “A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
82. “I’ve remained a virgin for you.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
83. “She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
84. “She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
85. “The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
86. “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
87. “Hate and love are reciprocal passions.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
88. “Fatality makes us invisible.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
89. “She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
90. “Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
91. “I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
92. “The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
93. “This soup tastes like windows.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
94. “Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
95. “Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
96. “For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
97. “As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
98. “The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
99. “At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled until you lose all grasp of time and place.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
100. “Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
101. “As a writer, I’m merely a journalist who has learned to write better than others.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
102. “Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
103. “It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
104. “It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
105. “He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
106. “Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
107. “The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
108. “There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
109. “We’ll grow old waiting.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
110. “In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
111. “The people of the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don’t understand is why a country that manages to do so well cannot do better in choosing its president.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
112. “She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .”
— Gabriel García Márquez
113. “For a week I did not take off my mechanic’s coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I’d never had anyone to do that for.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
114. “He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
115. “More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
116. “I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
117. “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
118. “There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
119. “One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!”
— Gabriel García Márquez
120. “Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
121. “Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
122. “An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
123. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
124. “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
125. “It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.”
— Gabriel García Márquez
