You can also enjoy this collection of famous Gabriel García Márquez quotes in Spanish.

Few writers have left their mark on Latin America's literary world like Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. An iconic 20th-century writer, García Márquez began his career in journalism, though he also wrote comics and poems from an early age. During his time as a journalist, he joined the Barranquilla Group, working with other influential and inspirational authors who went on to help shape his creative journey.

Once García Márquez began writing fiction, he composed a wide range of iconic and unforgettable works. From short stories and novellas to longer novels, García Márquez explored many themes, including life, death, love, war, grief, family, and solitude. He began with largely true-to-life works depicting the reality of life in Colombia, especially in rural areas. His later style, magical realism, invites listeners into a world where the mundane is made special and the extraordinary is treated as everyday. Many of his stories surround the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, thought to be based on his own hometown of Aracataca.

In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first Colombian to ever be awarded the honor. His career as an author was far from over, however, and he published some of his most famous works, including Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores after his win. In all, García Márquez wrote over two dozen major works, including novels, novellas, short story collections, and nonfiction pieces. He also wrote over two dozen screenplays, leaving his mark on the world of film as well as the world of literature.

As he aged, García Márquez suffered from failing health and turned to writing his memoirs. Though he was projected to complete a three-volume set, he never finished. García Márquez died in 2014, leaving behind a towering sense of loss both in the Latin American writing community and in the creative world at large. For a personal tribute to García Márquez that celebrates his life and mourns his death, listen to A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, a touching homage from son Rodrigo García.

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes About Life

We must all get through this life, one way or another. The charge of an author is to explore how we get from one moment to the next. For decades, Gabriel García Márquez wrote about the realistic experiences of Colombians. The fantastical elements included in his works of magical realism only serve to highlight the ways in which humans of all kinds are connected, going through many of the same facets of life, though in different ways. From inspirational quotes about living your life for your own happiness to reflections on human nature, here are some of García Márquez's most moving quotes on life and living.

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

2. “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” -

3. “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” - Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

4. “Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” -

5. “No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.” -

6. “The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.” - Memories of My Melancholy Whores

7. “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

8. "He who awaits much can expect little." -

9. "Life is the best thing that has ever been invented." - No One Writes to the Colonel: and Other Stories

10. “It is life, more than death, that has no limits.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes About Death

Death is not a stranger in Gabriel García Márquez's books. There are a number of references to La Violencia, a decade-long Colombian civil war that took place while García Márquez was a young man. However, there is also a deep exploration of the quiet reality of death, winding as a thread through many of the stories García Márquez chose to tell. Often, he explored the theme of death as it intertwined with love and the effects one had on the other, creating poignant quotes that will touch the heart. Both moving and pragmatic, García Márquez's portrayal of death is unparalleled in its beauty and depth.

11. “If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.” -

12. “The only thing that comes for sure is death, colonel.” - No One Writes to the Colonel: and Other Stories

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes About Love

Gabriel García Márquez may be most famous for his musings on love, and there are plenty of brilliant quotes about love found in his writings. Love is a major theme in several of his works—novels, novellas, and short stories alike. Falling in love, unrequited love, quiet love, dramatic love: García Márquez explored love in all its intricacies in his writings. Each of his quotes is steeped in the simple reality of love, as García Márquez often explored the mundanity of love: how it requires work to succeed alongside the sweeping romance of his more sentimental passages. Look into love from every angle with both the down-to-earth and the passionate lovers of García Márquez's worlds.

13. "Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

14. “She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

15. “There is always something left to love.” - One Hundred Years of Solitude

16. "Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” - One Hundred Years of Solitude

17. “To him, she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

18. “With her, Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

19. “She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

20. “She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

21. “He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'" - Love in the Time of Cholera

22. “I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.” - Memories of My Melancholy Whores

23. “I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.” -

24. “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." - Love in the Time of Cholera

25. “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.” - Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez Quotes About Writing

Before the fame, the renown, and the global recognition, Gabriel García Márquez was simply a writer. To the end of his days, he continued to be a writer first and foremost, and many of his works, both fiction and nonfiction, contained references to his thoughts on the craft. His ideas range from motivational to humorous to simple meditations on what writing is and what it means to him. These quotes offer a peek behind the curtain at what sort of man García Márquez was when he put pen to paper. Delve into García Márquez's view of what it means to write, from an author whose name is known around the world.

26. "The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry." - Of Love and Other Demons

27. "I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life." - Memories of My Melancholy Whores

28. “The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.” -