Famous quotes by Gabriel Garcia Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The web search "famous phrases by Gabriel Garcia Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude" is common. And it is that this work set the tone, and even today, more than 60 years after its publication, it continues to talk about. Gabriel García Márquez is undoubtedly one of the most prominent representatives of magical realism and Latin American literature in general. Not surprisingly, "Gabo" was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. For this reason, this article presents a selection with the best phrases from One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), his masterpiece.

This novel is considered by scholars as a text of universal significance. It's more, the Iberian newspaper El Mundo included it in the "list of the 100 best novels in Spanish of the XNUMXth century". For its part, the French newspaper Le Monde He mentions it among the "100 best books of the 100th century." Likewise, for the Norwegian Book Club it is one of the “XNUMX best books of all time”.

About the Author

Birth, childhood and academic training

Gabriel Jose de la Concordia Garcia Marquez (March 6, 1927 - April 17, 2014) was born in Aracataca, department of Magdalena, Colombia. Gabriel Eligio García was his parents, and Luisa Santiaga Márquez, his mother. "Gabito" he was left in the care of his maternal grandparents in his hometown. But in 1936 his grandfather passed away and her grandmother ended up being blind, therefore, she returned to her parents in Sucre.

He attended his first years of high school at the Jesuit school San José (today, Instituto San José). At that time he began to publish poems in the collegiate magazine Youth. Subsequently, rHe received a government scholarship to study at the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, near Bogotá. There he obtained his bachelor's degree and later began studying law at the National University of Colombia.

Influences and first jobs

In reality, the law career was not a vocational choice but rather an attempt to please her parent. Since García Márquez's true desire was to become a writer. Also, during that time it was markedly marked by authors such as Franz Kafka and Borges.

That way, was configuring a style that mixed the crazy stories of his grandmother with style features inspired by Metamorphosis, for example. During September 1947 he published his first short story El Espectador. Meanwhile, he continued his law career until the so-called Bogotazo, which occurred on April 9, 1948 after the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

His journalistic career and marriage

After the indefinite closure of the National University, Márquez went to the University of Cartagena and got a job as a reporter in El Universal. In 1950, he definitively left his law degree to practice journalism in Barranquilla. In the capital of the Department of Atlántico he married Mercedes Barcha in March 1958.

The couple had two children: Rodrigo (1959) and Gonzalo (1964). In 1961, Gabriel García Márquez moved with his family to New York, where he worked as a correspondent for Prensa Latina. However, due to his closeness and favorable reports towards the figure of Fidel Castro, he received strong criticism from Cuban dissidents.

Literary consecration

García Márquez and his family emigrated to Mexico City after receiving threats from the CIA. In Aztec lands he established his residence and spent most of the rest of his life, despite having homes in Bogotá, Cartagena de Indias and Paris.

En the Mexican metropolis published in June 1967 his consecrating work: One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The legacy of One Hundred Years of Solitude

This book became a famous title within Latin American magical realism thanks to its masterful combination of feasible elements, fictitious passages and extrapolated events from Colombian history. For this reason, the initially prosperous, then convulsed and finally exterminated town of Macondo, became world famous.

In that scenario, García Márquez explored topics such as loneliness, incest, fantasy, wars, commercialism and politicking. Nor is there a lack of intrigues and love affairs between the protagonists of a story that spans seven generations described in a cyclical time. (Although, within an identifiable historical framework).

Some of additional about One Hundred Years of Solitude

  • It sold half a million copies during its first three years,
  • It has been translated into twenty-five languages.
  • It is considered the best-selling book in the world originally published in Spanish.

The best phrases of One Hundred Years of Solitude

  • "The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention them you had to point your finger at them."
  • "You don't die when you should, but when you can."
  • “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 ”.
  • «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 ».
  • "He asked what city that was, and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, which had no meaning, but which had a supernatural resonance in the dream: Macondo."
  • "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."
  • “A pistol shot was fired in the chest and the projectile came out of his back without hitting any vital center. The only thing that remained of all that was a street with his name in Macondo ”.
  •  "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."
  • "The secret of a good old age is nothing more than an honest pact with loneliness."
  • "She always found a way to reject him because even though she couldn't love him, she couldn't live without him anymore."
  • "Actually, he did not care about death, but life, and that is why the feeling he experienced when they pronounced the sentence was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia."
  • “On that he lived. He had circled the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a crew of stateless sailors ”.
  • "They promised to establish a breeding ground for magnificent animals, not so much to enjoy victories that they would not need then, but to have something to amuse themselves with on the tedious Sundays of death."
  • "He felt forgotten, not with the remediable forgetting of the heart, but with another more cruel and irrevocable forgetting that he knew very well, because it was the forgetting of death."
  • "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."
  • "Like all the good things that happened to them in their long lives, that unbridled fortune had its origin in chance."
  • "Only he knew then that his stunned heart was forever doomed to uncertainty."
  • "He had the rare virtue of not existing completely but at the right time."
  • “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 found that these ravages did not arouse in him even a feeling of pity. He then made a last effort to search his heart for the place where his affections had rotted, and he could not find it.
  • “Open your eyes wide. With any of them, your children will come out with a pig's tail ”.
  • "The world was reduced to the surface of his skin, and the interior was safe from all bitterness."
  • "Too late I convince myself that I would have done you a great favor if I had let you be shot."
  • “It rained for 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 scamp, but they soon got used to interpreting the pauses as announcements of a recrudescence ”.
  • "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 almost forty years late the privileges of simplicity."
  • "The last time they had helped her to count 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."
  • "The oldest cry in the history of mankind is the cry of love."
  • "No one should know its meaning until they have reached one hundred years."

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  1.   Sixto Rodriguez Hernandez said

    Some of the selected phrases are of extraordinary beauty. Others are hyperbolic and others are full of wit or humor or both.