Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, died last week at 87. The Colombian writer helped to popularize “magical realism,” a genre of fiction writing in which “the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination,” as the Nobel committee described it in 1982. Here, in honor of the writer’s memory, 10 thought-provoking quotes from his works and interviews.
1. “What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it.” —One Hundred Years of Solitude
2. “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.” —Love in the Time of Cholera
3. “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” —Memories of My Melancholy Whores
4. “Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom.” —Love in the Time of Cholera
5. “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.” —Memories of My Melancholy Whores
6. “Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.” —Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
7. “Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.” —Of Love and Other Demons
8. “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.” —Love in the Time of Cholera
9. “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: A Life
10. “If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.” —One Hundred Years of Solitude
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