Quotes

[ The punishment of a billiard sharp :]

And make each prisoner pent

Three little maids who, all unwary,

To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,

[ Yum-Yum :] Everything is a source of fun.

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist—

My family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering.

Behold the Lord High Executioner!

When the enterprising burglar isn’t burgling, When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime.

Twenty love-sick maidens we, Love-sick all against our will.

When a felon’s not engaged in his employment

Our feelings we with difficulty smother

When the foeman bares his steel Tarantara! tarantara!

I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical,

You shall quickly be parsonified,

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,

Here’s a first-rate opportunity

Poor wandering one!

Things are seldom what they seem,

He is an Englishman!

When I was a lad I served a term

Bad language or abuse,

And I think it only right

To return the compliment.

Then give three cheers, and one cheer more,

[ Captain :] I do my best to satisfy you all—

[ Captain :] And I’m never, never sick at sea!

[ Captain :] I am the Captain of the Pinafore ;

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent .

[ In response to being asked who was the greatest nineteenth-century poet :] Hugo,—hélas!

Everything has been said before; but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

If you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.

[ Remark to reporters after his grandson had been kidnapped and a ransom payment was demanded, Guildford, England, 26 July 1973 :] I have 14 other grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 other kidnapped grandchildren.

I know you lawyers can, with ease,

Life is a jest; and all things show it.

Toute passe.—L’art robuste

A miss for pleasure, and a wife for breed.

I confess indeed that the Fermat theorem as an isolated proposition has little interest for me, since a multitude of such propositions, which one can neither prove nor refute, can be easily promulgated.

640K ought to be enough for anyone.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on the earth.

At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.