por I leave you the best quotes of Love in the time of cholera (in order of appearance), a novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1985. The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help of Fermina’s Aunt.
They exchange several love letters. However, once Fermina’s father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the relationship, he forces his daughter to stop seeing Florentino immediately.
When she refuses, father and daughter move with his late wife’s family to another city. Regardless of the distance, Fermina and Florentino continue to communicate by telegraph.
However, upon her return, Fermina realizes that her relationship with Florentino was nothing more than a dream, since they are practically strangers; she breaks her engagement with Florentino and throws away all her cards.
When Fermina decides to marry a rich doctor from a good family, Florentino ends up devastated, but he is a romantic. Fermina’s husband dies, and Florentino deliberately attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months and four days after declaring his love for Fermina, he will do it again.
List of phrases from Love in the time of cholera
1-It was inevitable: the smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of upset love.
2-He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the camp cot where he had always slept, near a stool with the bucket that had served to vaporize the poison.
3-A police commissioner had come forward with a very young medical student who was doing his forensic practice at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the corpse while Dr. Urbino arrived.
4-I will have plenty of time to rest when I die but this eventuality is not yet in my plans.
5-The instructions to the commissioner and the practitioner were precise and fast. There was no autopsy to be done.
6-There will not be a lack of some crazy love here that will give you the opportunity one of these days.
7-When you find it, take a good look -he told the practitioner, -they usually have sand in their hearts.
8-Remotes, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the cathedral were heard calling the high mass.
9-If it had been a crime, there would be a good clue here, he told himself. I only know of one man capable of composing this masterful ambush.
10-It was a half-truth, but they believed it to be complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tile from the floor and there they found a very used account book where the keys to open the safe were.
11-He got up with the first cocks, and at that time he began to take his secret medicines…
12-Despite his age, he resisted receiving patients in the office, and continued to attend to them in their homes, as he always did, since the city was so domestic that he could walk anywhere.
13-Although he refused to retire, he was aware that they only called him to deal with hopeless cases, but he considered that this was also a form of specialization.
14-In any case -he used to say in class-, the little medicine that is known is only known by some doctors.
15-The mood of the sky had begun to decompose very early, and it was cloudy and cool, but there was no risk of rain before noon.
16-Furthermore, the clandestinity shared with a man who was never completely his, and in which more than once they experienced the instantaneous explosion of happiness, did not seem to him an undesirable condition.
17-«I will never be old.» She interpreted it as a heroic purpose to fight mercilessly against the ravages of time, but he was more explicit: he had the irrevocable determination to take his own life at the age of sixty.
18-And she was glad, because she preferred to continue evoking the dead lover as he had asked her the night before, when he interrupted the letter that had already begun and looked at her for the last time.
19-The fact that the parrot had maintained its privileges after that historical rudeness had been the final proof of its sacred jurisdiction.
20-It was one of the good ones, lighter than it seemed, and with a yellow head and black tongue, the only way to distinguish it from the mangrove parrots that did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories.
21-Another very different thing would have been life for both of them, had they known in time that it was easier to overcome the great marital catastrophes than the minuscule miseries of every day.
22-It was hot like a ship’s boiler, because they had to close the windows to prevent the rain from entering, slanted by the wind.
23-Relieved by one more victory over old age, he abandoned himself to the transparent and fluid lyricism of the last piece of the program, which he could not identify.
24-From pure experience, although without scientific foundation, Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew that most deadly diseases had their own smell, but none was as specific as that of old age.
25-In any case, the tragedy was a shock not only among its people, but also affected the common people by contagion, who took to the streets with the illusion of knowing even the splendor of the legend.
26-The night of the death of Dr. Urbino he was dressed as he was surprised by the news, which was how he always was despite the infernal heat of June…
27-However, he managed to find out that Fermina Daza had been invited to a Saturday dance a few days after her arrival, and that her father had not allowed her to attend with a final sentence: «Everything will be done in due time.»
28-Take advantage now that you are young to suffer as much as you can -I told him-, these things do not last a lifetime.
29-It was the year of fierce love. Neither one nor the other had a life for anything other than to think of the other, to dream of the other, to wait for the letters with as much anxiety as they answered them.
30-Reading became an insatiable vice. Ever since she taught him to read, his mother bought him illustrated books by Nordic authors, which were sold as children’s stories…
31-He tried to seduce her with all kinds of flattery. He tried to make her understand that her love at her age was a mirage, he tried to convince her to return her letters and return to school to apologize on her knees…
32-The rest of the day was like a hallucination, in the same house where she had been until yesterday, receiving the same visitors who had fired her, talking about the same thing, and dazed by the impression of living a piece of life again already lived.
33-He followed her without being seen, discovering the daily gestures, the grace, the premature maturity of the being he loved most in the world and whom he saw for the first time in his natural state.
34-He liked to say that that love had been the fruit of a clinical mistake.
35-Cholera became an obsession. She didn’t know much more about him than what she learned routinely in some marginal course, and it had seemed implausible to her that only thirty years before he had caused in France, including Paris, more than one hundred and forty thousand deaths.
36-The blindfold highlighted the purity of his lips between the round, black beard and the sharp-tipped mustaches, and she felt shaken by a flash of panic.
37-She knew that she was going to get married the following Saturday, in a thunderous wedding, and the being who loved her the most and would love her forever would not even have the right to die for her.
38-He took her hand, cold and clenched with terror, entwined her fingers, and almost with a whisper began to tell her memories of other sea voyages.
39-Thus, between opera anchors and Neapolitan serenades, his creative talent and his invincible entrepreneurial spirit made him the hero of river navigation in his heyday.
40-The lighthouse tower was always a lucky refuge that he evoked with nostalgia when he already had everything resolved at the dawn of old age…
41-It was the mistake of his life, as his conscience was going to remind him every hour of every day, until the last day.
42-It was already late: the occasion was with her in the mule tram, it had always been with her in the same chair in which she was sitting, but now it had gone forever.
43-When he realized that he had begun to love her, she was already in the fullness of forty, and he was going to turn thirty.
44-In the restful leisure of solitude, on the other hand, widows discovered that the honest way of living was at the mercy of the body…
45-The most absurd thing about the situation of both was that they never seemed so happy in public as in those years of misfortune.
46-However, when I believed it had been completely erased from memory, it reappeared where I least expected it, turned into a ghost of its nostalgia.
47-The truth is that his sense of smell was not only useful for washing clothes or for finding lost children: it was his sense of direction in all aspects of life, and above all in social life.
48-So that love became impossible when the car became too noticeable at the door, and after three months they were nothing more than ridiculous.
49-However, very soon he was going to learn that this excessive determination was not so much the fruit of resentment as of nostalgia.
50-That was how he found himself when he least expected it in the sanctuary of a love extinguished before birth.
51-Most of the partners took those disputes as marriage lawsuits, in which both parties are right.
52-The persistence of his memory increased his anger. When she woke up thinking of him the day after the funeral, she managed to remove him from her memory with a simple gesture of her will.
53-Death has no sense of the ridiculous, he said, and added sadly: «especially at our age.»
54-He had the good sense not to expect an immediate reply, since it was enough for him that the letter was not returned to him.
55-It was a forbidden word: before. She felt the chimerical angel from the past pass by, and she tried to avoid it.
56-The roles were reversed. Then it was she who tried to give him new encouragement to see the future, with a phrase that he, in his reckless haste, could not decipher: Let time pass and we’ll see what it brings.
57-The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing.
58-Both went to sleep when the music ended, after a long conversation without incident in the dark gazebo.
59-It always happened to him the first time, with all of them, forever, so he had learned to live with that ghost: each time he had to learn again, as if it were the first time.
60-Florentino Ariza had prepared the answer for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. -Lifetime
61-Love of the soul from the waist up and love of the body from the waist down.
62-And he looked at her for the last time forever with the brightest, saddest and most grateful eyes that she had never seen him in half a century of living together, and managed to tell her with…