My heart is heavy, the author of one of my favourite books Mr Gabriel Gárcia Márquez is now with the angels.

 At least he will no longer suffer the burdens of this life that he so beautifully articulated in his prose. 

I thought I'd compile a list of just a few of my favourite quotes of his so if you've not read any of his books, you can share in a bit of his wit & magic. 

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

16) "He who awaits much can expect little."

17) "No medicine cures what happiness cannot."

18) "Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

19) "It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."

20) "No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing." 

-Love in the time of Cholera

21) "The writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation."

-No one writes but the colonel

22) “But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”

-Love in the time of cholera 

23) “Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.”

24)"Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry."

25) "All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret."

26) "Nothing in this world was more difficult than love."

27) "Just because someone does not love you as you want, it does not mean that you do not love with all his being."

And lastly one of my favourites:

"The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love."

Rest in soft, sweet peace Mr Márquez & thank you for sharing your light with the world and touching millions with your beautifully crafted prose. Only few can make hearts ache like you did, and through your work, you are immortal. 

1917-2014

❤️