Gabriel García Márquez: Some Of His Best Literary Quotes

Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014, 87 Years Of Genius And Wonder

Gabriel García Márquez's magical realist novels and short stories exposed millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, he achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

Gabriel García Márquez's flamboyant and melancholy fictional works – among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," ''Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" – outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

The Nobel laureate, who was widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes and whose novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality, died at home in Mexico City around midday Thursday. He was 87.

Here are some of his most famous and inspirational quotes:

- “Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.”

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

- “The secret of a good old age is simply an honest pact with solitude.”

- “If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”

- “But if they had learned anything together it was that wisdom arrives when it's no longer useful.”

- “There is always something left to love.”

- “He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stone cutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.”

- “It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

- “Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it.”

- “They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”

- “He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”

- “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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