topics: |  fiction | colombia | spanish | latin-america | magic-realism | classic | nobel-1982

QUOTES:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him
to discover ice. (p 1)

[Referring to Arcadio] He imposed obligatory military service for men over
eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets
after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He
sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and
prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a
Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims,
he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a
scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously. (p. 104)

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the
security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the
uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. 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. He
did not speak until they asked him for his last request. (p. 119)

"A person fucks himself up so much," Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, "Fucks
himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can't do
anything about it." (p. 128)

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the
dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he
would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the
wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and
in all places. 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 the dunghill of
war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile,
looking for a way of killing her with his own death. (p. 148) [Referring to
Aureliano José]

Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in
orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's
bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her
the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to
die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been
directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. (p. 153)

Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was
bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he
imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he
met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with
his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted
them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied,
and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were
lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friend a
person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died." (p. 166)

At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour
before the execution. "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel
Gerineldo Marquez. "Let's get out of here before the mosquitos in here
execute you." Colonel Gerineldo Marquez could not express the disdain that
was inspired in him by that attitude.  "No, Aureliano," he replied. "I'd
rather be dead than see you changed into a tyrant."  "You won't see me,"
Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. "Put your shoes and help me get this shitty
war over with."  When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start
a war than to end one. (p. 169)

"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can." - Colonel Aureliano
Buendía (p. 241)

    "Shit!" she shouted.
    Amaranta, who was starting to put the clothes into the trunk, thought
that she had been bitten by a scorpion.
    "Where is it?" she asked in alarm.
    "What?"
    "The bug!" Amaranta said.
    Úrsula put a finger on her heart.
    "Here," she said. (p. 251)

The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed. (p. 269)

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe
from all bitterness. (p. 279) [Referring to Amaranta]

"One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship."
- Úrsula (p. 282)

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had
become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and
love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to
sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula
were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the
earth. (p. 404)