Quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude

An empty canvas is an empty canvas. My mind is no more colorful than the empty canvas that has spent twenty years in the attic. It is gray, stained with occasional drops of water that managed to seep through. But an empty canvas is an empty canvas. In a weird sense, though, this drab grey loneliness and icy heart that stopped throbbing the moment I became aware of myself defined who I am. I am and I will be empty.

Time is abrasive. What little memories I have of past will escape through my fingers, and one day I will wake up a white, colorless parchment. But when that day comes, when I give up my fight to fill my hollow inside, I'll have my peace. Some people were born to stain their heart with pains, joys and loss. I was born to relinquish them all. I was born to not resist the bleak existence but to accept the solitude.

This book, One Hundred Years of Solitude opened my eyes. It came to me like it would to no one else. To me, this book was not a razzle dazzle of magical realism, but of solitude. At times, the book was truly depressing, melting any romantic aura that often surrounds the concept solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has shown me, along with many beautiful phrases that left permanent imprint on my mind, that solitude is a tragedy, one of not being understood.

The following are excerpts from the book that I found to be amazing. Gregory Rabassa, who translated this work, has done a truly amazing job, giving it a distinctive voice.

"Repudiated by his tribe, having lost all of his supernatural faculties because of his faithfulness to life, he decided to take refuge in that corner of the world which had still not been discovered by death, dedicated to the operation of a daguerreotype laboratory."

"Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment."

"Then they went into Jose Arcadio Buendia's room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by."

"But Rebecca was already beyond any vanity. After searching for it uselessly in the taste of earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered room."

"Perhaps it was that crossing of stature, names, and character that made Ursula suspect that they had been shuffled like a deck of cards since childhood."

"More than her art, the guests admired her duality. Her frivolous and even slightly infantile character did not seem up to any serious activity, but when she sat down at the clavichord she became a different girl, one whose unforeseen maturity gave her the air of an adult."

(This reminded me a lot about Kristin Chenoweth.)

"A short time before the death of Amaranta she suddenly stumbled into an open space of lucidity within the madness and she trembled before the uncertainty of future."

"Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first wave of nostalgia."