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."

Onions

It was a late afternoon. The sun was setting, leaving a deep red hue behind. Everything was dim. He could barely see anything, but the old man continued to polish his russian dolls, even the tiniest piece that couldn't fit anything.
It may have been the hundredth time that his grand son had seen his grandpa clean the dolls. Yet, he never understood why his grandpa cared so much. The little kid, being a kid, asked "Grandpa, why do you like the dolls so much?" The man answered, "You know, people are like onions. Hm.. Do you like Ms. Leigh?"
"I do, I do!"
"Well, she's a very nice person, but perhaps she might be very mean to her siblings?"
"Really?" said the boy, who could not imagine his teacher being mean.
"Sometimes, people can pretend to be someone else. When you get to know someone you slowly reveal who you really are. I like these dolls because they remind me that people are layered."
"Okay... So what happens if I marry someone. Would I get to know all about her?"
"Well, you might, you might not. Sometimes, people hold on to their deepest secrets. For some people, it is what keeps them alive. It's their soul. They are afraid that if they tell it to someone, they'll lose their soul."
"What if I reaaaally love someone and share eeeverything with her? Am I going to die?" said the boy, his eyes widening.
The man chuckled, "No, no, no. You see, the thing that makes who we are is not the secrets nor the essence that you don't share with anyone. The layers define who you are. See you told Jane that you like dogs?"
Sheepishly, he said, "Yes?"
"But I know that you really like cats. So are you a cat person or a dog person?"
"I'm a cat person!"
"Noo, that was a trick question," the old man grinned. "You are both. When you pretend for long enough, you'll learn to like dogs. It becomes part of you. There is no such thing as pretension. There's only action. You are no more the person that you think you are than the person that you pretend to be"
"..." The boy walked away, confused.
The old man kept on polishing the dolls. The remains of the sun tainted the sky with a purple dye. He was sad, but his sorrows could not fill up the void in his heart. He lied. He was nothing more than layers of pretensions. He was hollow. His anger, his passion, his love, they were what people expected to see from him. He gave them what they wanted. But he was only a collage of images, strewn together to hide nothing.
He put the dolls back together. The dusk was now over.