Sometime a few certain
moments can take you through someone’s whole life. Similarly, one may have to
go through only some snippets to understand what the whole book is about. Read
on.
One
“All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the
patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of
love were the same as those of cholera.”
“She reminded him that the weak would never enter the
kingdom of love, which is harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give
themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need
in order to face life.”
Two
“Curiosity was one of the many masks of love. In reality
they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting
her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself in every line.”
Three
“Then suddenly,
instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an
instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked
herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for
so long and with so much ferocity. She just managed to think: My God, poor
man!”
Four
“From the time she woke up at six in the morning until she
turned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing
time. Life was imposed on her from outside. When she finished washing cages and
feeding birds, and making certain that the flowers wanted for nothing, she was
at a loss”
“She herself had not
realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the
city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the
grace of Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had
ever happened to her in her life”
Five
“Florentino Ariza
learned that Fermina Daza was going to marry a physician with family and
fortune, educated in Europe and with an extraordinary reputation for a man of
his years, there was no power on earth that could raise him from his
prostration”
Six
“…was the certainty that during the intoxication of her
wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina
Daza would suffer one moment, one at least but one in any event, when the
phantom of the sweetheart she had scorned, humiliated, and insulted would
appear in her thoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.”
“...the confusion caused by her rejection of Florentino
Ariza had not been resolved with comforting words. These doubts increased her
confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was what she most
needed to live.”
Seven
“He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her
because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, because when
she kissed him for the first time, he was sure there would be no obstacle to
their inventing true love.”
“She was a prisoner in the wrong house and even worse, with
a man who was not…She suspected too late that behind his wordly charm and
professional authority, the man she had married was a hopeless weakling: a poor
devil made bold by the social weight of his family names”
Nine
“We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a
woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no
fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at
its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”
Ten
“She helped Florentino Ariza take his enemas, she got up
before he did to brush the false teeth he kept in a glass while he slept, and
she solved the problem of her misplaced spectacles, for she could use his for
reading and mending…the only thing she needed from him was that he cup a pain
in her back.
“They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and phantoms and disillusionment: beyond love. For they had lived long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”
How long would you wait for love?
