"That's what the drum is about - it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow. (p180)"

"If only the wind could reach inside me, wipe clean my heartache, my guilt, my confusion. If only the waves could wash away this heartache, this jealousy and rage, this guilt and sadness. If only the rocks could lend me their stability, their strength, so I might choose wisely. If only the sun could burn away my past, so I would not have to live with any regrets."

"Follow me on a journey into heaven and hell, past angels and devils, into the realm of dreams. That is where our souls go when we sleep, to meet up with our soul mate, to love without abandon, without regret. For in the morning we must return to life and all its painful illusions."

"Back home, these lessons were taught in songs and stories passed along by grandmothers, wise women who held a cherished place in the circle of community. I thought someday to take my place among them. But the war had broken the cycle and torn millions of people away from the bosoms of their mothers. We were forever searching to recapture all that we had lost … connections to blood, to bones, to earth. And connections resurface … refuse to be denied."

"I would add to my mother’s wisdom that the key to love is in the breath. You know you love a man when you can stand his breath in the morning after a night of drinking and cigarettes. When you can kiss him after he finishes a garlic and butter sandwich and still enjoy the feel of his lips. When he looks into your eyes, tells you he loves you—and the pickled herring and onions are stronger than his voice—yet you still smile. You still want to be close to him. Yes, then you have found love. My Baba used to say that the breath is a taste of the spirit. When two spirits recognize each other in memory and future, then love grows."

"Just when you think that life is slowing down, magic happens. The universe sends you a message, like a tsvit paporot on your doorstep. The question is: what do you wish for?"

"Sometimes, if you stand very still in the shadows of those places, you can hear songs on the wind, whispers in the trees. That is why I travel."

"By dancing we could remain in the moment. By dancing we could avoid talking, dwelling on the past, or thinking about the future. We were connected in a way that was neither threatening nor complicated; just circling and swaying, following the oldest rhythms of breath and heartbeat."

"Once a century the world is divided into before and after."

"...letters of a burning book dance in flame not every time and not every time literally."

"The knack of living — how skilfully it kills!"

"Leviathan learning to overcome time"

"The century has started with the crime of the century."

"...nothing else left but to watch eternity breaking up into human splinters."

""Women don't survive here," a woman of eighty said."

"Polluters of void."

"The bigger the house, the smaller the occupants."

"Europe is shrinking, but America is broadening."

"What shall we do after we learn what we'll do: that is the question."

"When you kill wolves people die."

"Caliban fights the Taliban"

"'Sorry, we gave you a wrong life,' they said not too apologetically. 'Will you begin anew?'"

"Un médico es la conjunción de un guardapolvo, un estetoscópio y una jerga."

"No he notado en las feministas mayor simpatía por las otras mujeres."

"La vida es difícil. Para estar en paz con uno mismo hay que decir la verdad. Para estar en paz con el prójimo hay que mentir."

"Debió de recibir una buena noticia, porque ayer tenía el pelo blanco y hoy apareció completamente rubia."

"Más exclusivamente que en la vigilia, en el sueño somos nosotros. Contribuimos con todo el reparto."

"Revolución: Movimiento político que ilusiona a muchos, desiluciona a más, incomoda a casi todos y enriquece extraordinariamente a unos pocos. Goza de firme prestigio."

"Las mujeres son el impuesto que pagamos por el placer."

"La vida es una partida de ajedrez y nunca sabe uno a ciencia cierta cuándo está ganando o perdiendo.""

"El mundo atribuye sus infortunios a las conspiraciones y maquinaciones de grandes malvados. Entiendo que se subestima la estupidez."

"Llega un momento en la vida en que, haga uno lo que haga, solamente aburre. Queda entonces una manera de recuperar el prestigio: morir."

"En la vejez todo es triste y ridículo: hasta el miedo a la muerte."

"Creyó por primera vez entender porqué se decía que la vida es sueño: si uno vive bastante, los hechos de su vida, como los de un sueño, su vuelven incomunicables porque a nadie interesan."

"¿No es lo mismo que suceda lo que deseamos, que desear lo que suceda? Lo que importa es que nuestra voluntad y los sucesos estén de acuerdo."

"El mismo lobo tiene momentos de debilidad, en que se pone del lado del cordero y piensa: Ojalá que huya."

"Toda máquina está en proceso de extinción."

"It was not until 1937 that Argentine fantastic literature would experience its greatest achievements. The creative trio of Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, good friends in Buenos Aires, met to publish their first anthology of fantastic literature."

"A veces pienso que 'La vida de los poetas' de Johnson es todo lo que necesito para ser feliz."

"The most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune. On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man." I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possiblity. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

"Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years had to elapse in order for a butterfly to learn how to fly; 180 million years to create a rose with no other commitment than to be beautiful; and four geological eras in order for us human beings to be able to sing better than birds, and to be able to die from love. It is not honorable for the human talent, in the golden age of science, to have conceived the way for such an ancient and colossal process to return to the nothingness from which it came through the simple act of pushing a button."

"...a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth ..."

"Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him."

"Chinese literature cannot be separated from world literature. The impact of Marquez on me can be viewed as a communication between the minds of a foreign writer and a Chinese writer. On the basis of the impact from outside, the Chinese writer can transform and develop his own style."

"I'm more interested in writers like Marquez who have an instinctive way of handling the natural and the legendary in close proximity. This is very understandable to me in my part of the world; something not quite fantasy, and so much more compelling than the stilted naturalism of much metropolitan literature. He creates more than a mere replica of what happened during the day, more than a record of who said what."

"In One Hundred Years of Solitude,/Márquez wrote that we are birthed/by our mothers only once, but life obligates/us to give birth/to ourselves over and over."

"They thought Gabriel García Márquez's would be the way, because of his richness, because his work can be multilayer. He can use the Indian past and the Catholic-Spanish heritage. Keep it all. You don't have to cut that out, cut this out."

"I really admire Marquez's novel Chronicles of a Death Foretold. And one of the things that's so wonderful about the book is that it's very short, and he says a lot with very few words, and the characters show a lot of change. But he's a master, and I think if you're really good you can do it in less space; if you're new and inexperienced it takes longer."

"I read Marquez when I was a student and One Hundred Years of Solitude is kind of the bible that I used to try to figure out stories and how to tell them. But I also think that their [his and Isabel Allende's] sense of indigenous people and the land is very limited."

"Such a lovely man."