1. “I dare to think that it is this outsized reality [of South America], and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us...and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”
2. “Life is not what one has lived, but what one remembers and how one chooses to tell it.”
3. “The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.”
4. “She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
5. ”The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
