March 6 is an important date in the literature world because renown writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez was born. Even though he died April 17, 2014, he is still considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, and was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. García Márquez left law school to become a journalist, and maybe that’s why over the years, he was so critical with Colombian (his home country) and foreign politics.
Gabriel García Márquez wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), “Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.
Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude. Let’s honor this prolific author’s 90th birthday by quoting some of his best material.
1) “There is always something left to love.” -- One Hundred Years of Solitude
2) “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.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
3) “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.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
4) “It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” -- One Hundred Years of Solitude
5) “They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.” -- One Hundred Years of Solitude
6) “The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.” -- Memories of My Melancholy Whores
7) “Be calm. God awaits you at the door.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
8) “Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.” --- Love in the Time of Cholera
9) “You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.” -- El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba
10) “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
11) “Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
12) “Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
13) “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
14) “She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love .” -- Love in the Time of Cholera
15) “Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.” -- Of Love and Other Demons
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