Quotes from 100 years of solitude. Quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez wrote for 18 months. It was in Mexico City in 1965-1966. The author came up with the idea for the book when he left his native village of Arakataka with his mother in 1952. This is a strange, poetic, whimsical story about the city of Macondo, which is lost in the jungle.
According to the plot of the novel, all events take place in the fictional city of Macondo, but these events are related to the history of Colombia. This city was founded by José Arcadio Buendía, a strong-willed and impulsive leader who is deeply interested in the mysteries of the universe. These secrets were told to him by visiting gypsies. The city is growing and developing and this worries the government of the country. Founder and head of the city. At the same time, he successfully lures the sent mayor to his side.
But soon a civil war breaks out in the country and the inhabitants of the city of Macondo are drawn into it. Colonel Aureliano Buendia and son José Arcadio Buendia assemble a group of volunteers to fight against the conservative regime. During the colonel's stay in the war, his nephew Arcadio rules the city and becomes a cruel dictator. After 8 months, the city is captured by enemies and the conservatives shoot Arcadio.
The war has dragged on for decades. The colonel is already very tired of the struggle. He manages to conclude a peace treaty, after the signing of which Aureliano goes home. At the same time, a banana company with migrants and foreigners is moving to Macondo. The city is prosperous and one of the Buendia family, namely Aureliano Segundo raises cattle and quickly grows rich. Later, there is a strike of workers and the National Army shoots the demonstrators, and their bodies are loaded into wagons and dumped into the sea.
After this massacre, it has been raining continuously for 5 years in the city. At this time, the penultimate one in the Buendia family is born. His name is Aureliano Babylonia. The rain stops falling and at the age of more than 120 years, the wife of José Arcadio Buendía Ursula passes away. And Macondo becomes an empty and abandoned place where no livestock is even born, buildings collapse.
Aureliano Babylonia remains by himself in the dilapidated house of Buendia, where he studies the parchments of the gypsy Melquíades. But for some time he stops studying parchments due to the fact that he starts a stormy romance with his aunt Amaranta Ursula, who graduated from her studies in Belgium and came home. During the birth of their son, Amaranta dies. The newborn son ends up with a pig's tail, but is eaten by ants. Aureliano still deciphers the parchments. The city falls into a tornado and it, along with the house, is wiped off the face of the Earth.
Quotes from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
… lovers found themselves in a deserted world, the only and eternal reality in it was love.
There was no sentimentality in his thoughts about his loved ones - he severely summed up his life, beginning to understand how much he really loved those people whom he hated most of all.
... it was a war doomed to defeat, a war against "respecting you", "your obedient servants", who all promised to give, but never gave life-long pensions to veterans.
Quotes from the book
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
You need to listen to the voice of the child that you once were and that still exists somewhere inside you. If we listen to the child within us, our eyes will shine again. If we do not lose connection with this child, our connection with life will not break either.
A minute of reconciliation is worth more than a bosom friendship.
“Tell me, friend, what are you fighting for?”
“For what I owe, my friend,” said Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, “for the great party of liberals.”
- You're lucky you know. And I just now figured out that I'm fighting because of my pride.
“That's bad,” said Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.
His anxiety amused Colonel Aureliano Buendia.
“Of course,” he said. “But it's still better than not knowing what you're fighting for. He looked his comrade in the eye, smiled, and added, “Or fight like you for something that means nothing to anyone.”
One kind of love destroys its other kind, because a person, by virtue of his nature, having satisfied his hunger, loses interest in food.
The secret to a peaceful old age is to enter into a worthy collusion with loneliness.
He had to start thirty-two wars, break all his agreements with death, wallow like a pig in the dung of glory, so that he could discover - almost forty years late - the advantages of a simple life.
People live and wear the same names - and different, almost carnival, masks. Who can tell a hero from a traitor, a whore from a saint?
Loneliness put her memories in order - burned the piles of various depressing rubbish that life had accumulated in her heart, cleansed, glorified and made immortal other, bitterest memories.
As long as we live in the world, we remain your mothers and, even if you are revolutionaries at least a hundred times, we have the right to pull down your pants and beat you with a belt at the first disrespect for us.
Men need more than you think, she said cryptically. "Besides what you're thinking about, you have to cook endlessly, sweep, suffer over every little thing."
May 22, 2003
If the question is before you, what would you like to read? That's my advice to you. Gabriel GARCIA MARQUEZ (Gabriel GARCIA MARQUEZ - born March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia) is an outstanding Colombian writer, author of novels, short stories, short stories.
The novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was published in 1967 in Buenos Aires. The success was overwhelming, the circulation amounted to more than half a million copies in three and a half years, which is sensational for Latin America, and the world was talking about a new era in the history of the novel and realism. On the pages of numerous literary works, the term "magical realism" flashed. This is how the narrative style inherent in the novel by Marquez and the works of many Latin American writers was defined.
Remedios the Beauty was the only person who did not contract banana fever. The girl seemed to linger in the time of wonderful youth and became every day more alien to various conventions, more and more far from various cunning tricks and distrust, finding happiness in her own world of simple things.
Unable to understand why women complicate their lives with corsages and skirts, she sewed something like a hoodie out of rough canvas, which she put on right over her head, and thus once and for all solved the problem of how to be dressed and at the same time feel naked. : in her mind, the naked state was the only suitable for a home environment. For so long she was fed up with advice to shorten her slightly luxurious hair, which already reached her calves, braid it, decorate it with combs and colored ribbons, that in the end she simply cut her hair bald and made wigs for statues of saints out of her hair.
The most surprising thing about her instinctive desire for simplification was that the more Remedios the Beauty freed herself from fashion, seeking convenience, the more resolutely she overcame conventions, obeying free attraction, the more exciting her incredible beauty became and the more casual her treatment of men.
Soon she changed into men's clothes, rolled herself in the sand to climb a pole for a prize, and almost caused a tragic quarrel between twelve cousins, who were completely deranged by this unbearable sight. That is why Ursula did not leave any of them to sleep in the house when they arrived, and those four who lived in Macondo rented rooms on the side on her orders. If Remedios the Beauty had been told about these precautions, she would probably have died laughing. Until the very last moment of her stay on earth, the girl did not understand that fate had determined her to be a disturber of male peace, something like an everyday natural disaster.
Whenever she appeared in the dining-room in violation of Úrsula's prohibition, a turmoil akin to despair arose among the strangers. It was too conspicuous that there was nothing under the rough robe on Remedios the Beauty, and no one could believe that this cropped head, surprisingly perfect in form, was not a challenge, just as the shamelessness with which the girl opened her eyes was not a criminal seduction. thighs to cool off a little, and the pleasure with which she licked her fingers after eating.
Not a single person from the Buendia family suspected what the foreigners very soon discovered: a spirit of anxiety emanated from Remedios the Beauty, a breath of languor, they remained in the air for several hours after her departure. Men experienced in love torments, who knew love in all countries of the world, claimed that they had never experienced an excitement similar to that which the natural smell of Remedios the Beautiful gave rise to in them. In the gallery with begonias, in the living room, in any corner of the house, they could always accurately indicate the place where Remedios the Beauty had been, and determine how much time had passed since then.
She left behind a clear trace in the air that could not be confused with anything: none of the household noticed it because it had long become part of the everyday smells of the house, but strangers sensed it immediately. Therefore, only they understood how a young officer could die of love, and a caballero, who came from distant lands, fall into despair. Unaware that she was surrounded by an element of anxiety, that her presence aroused in men an unbearable feeling of inner catastrophe, Remedios the Beauty communicated with them without the slightest slyness and finally finished them off with her ingenuous courtesy.
When Ursula, in order to keep her great-granddaughter out of the sight of strangers, forced her to eat in the kitchen with Amaranta, Remedios the Beauty was even delighted, freed from the need to obey any order. In truth, she did not care where and when to eat, she preferred to eat not at certain hours, but depending on the vagaries of her appetite. Sometimes she suddenly got up to have a snack at three in the morning, and then slept until the evening and could live like that, mixing up the whole daily routine, for whole months, until finally some accident brought her back to the rules established in the house. But even then she left her bed at eleven o'clock in the morning, locked herself completely naked for two hours in the bath, and, killing scorpions, gradually came to herself after a deep and long sleep.
Then she began to douse herself with water, scooping it up in the pool with a gourd vessel. This long and meticulous procedure was accompanied by numerous ceremonies, and one who did not know Remedios the Beauty well might think that she was busy admiring her body, justifiably. But in fact, this secret rite was devoid of any sensuality, for Remedios the Beauty it was just a way to kill time until she wanted to eat.
One day, when she had just begun to bathe, a stranger took apart the tiles on the roof and took his breath away at the stunning spectacle of the nakedness of Remedios the Beauty. The girl noticed his despairing eyes between the tiles, but was not ashamed, but only alarmed.
- Watch out! - she exclaimed. - You will fall.
“I just want to look at you,” the stranger murmured.
“Oh yes,” she said. - Okay, just be careful, the roof is completely rotten.
The stranger's face expressed amazement and suffering, it seemed that he was silently struggling with the lust that overwhelmed him, fearing that the wondrous mirage would dissipate. Remedios the Beauty decided that he was terrified that the tiles would not have failed under him, and tried to wash faster than usual, not wanting to leave a person in danger for a long time. Dousing herself with water, the girl said that it was very bad when the roof was in such a state, and, probably, scorpions climbed into the pool from the leaves rotten from the rains, with which the tiles were littered. To the foreigner, this chatter seemed like a screen hiding favor, and when Remedios the Beauty began to lather, he could not resist the temptation to try his luck.
Let me soap you up,” he whispered.
"Thank you for your good intention," she replied, "but I'll manage with my two hands."
- Well, at least the back, - begged the stranger.
- Why? she wondered. - Where is it seen that people wash their backs with soap?
While she dried off, the stranger, with eyes full of tears, begged her to marry him. She frankly replied that she would never marry a simpleton who could lose an hour, even risking being left without dinner, just to see a woman bathing. When, in conclusion, Remedios the Beauty put on her robe and the foreigner made sure with his own eyes that she really, as many suspected, was putting it on her naked body, he felt forever branded by the red-hot iron of the secret revealed to him and could not bear it. He pulled out two more tiles to go down to the pool.
It's very high here, - the girl warned fearfully, - you will kill yourself!
The rotten roof collapsed down with a terrible roar of a mountain collapse, the man, barely having time to let out a cry of horror, fell to the cement floor, cracked his skull and died immediately.
The strangers, who came running to the noise from the dining room and hurried to carry away the corpse, noticed that his skin exuded the overwhelming smell of Remedios the Beauty. This smell firmly entered the body of the deceased, and even from the crack in his skull, instead of blood, ambergris oozed, saturated with the same mysterious aroma; and then it became clear to everyone that the smell of Remedios the Beauty continues to torment men even after death, until their bones turn to dust.
