Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mother gives birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
How awful, he said, the way time passes!
Hombres de mala ley, decía en voz muy baja, animales de mierda que no son capaces de hacer nada que no sean desgracias.»
His bones began to fill with sounds
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 ti...
He was in his coffin, ready to be buried, and yet he knew that he wasn’t dead.
He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.
He was another person, despite his firm decision and anguished effort to continue to be the same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love.The truth is that he was never the same again. Wi...
He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.
He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.
He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in...
He finished shaving by touch, still walking around the room, for he tried to see himself in the mirror as little as possible so he would not have to look into his own eyes.
Freedom is often the first casualty of war.
For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the s...
For the first time in the interminable twenty-seven years that he had been waiting, Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in ord...
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 y...
Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seem to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine business lett...
Florentino Ariza was left with the nagging suspicion that this was not her last word. He believed that when a woman says no, she is waiting to be urged before making her final decision, but with her h...
Fermina, he said, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.
Fear had absorbed her completely and remained there, fixed, tenacious, almost corporeal, as if it were some invisible person who had made up his mind not to leave the room. And the most upsetting part...