A Poet Reflects

“However, almost as much as rolling in bed until they were exhausted, she liked to devote the aftermath of love to the cult of poetry.  She had an astonishing memory for the sentimental verses of her own time, where were sold in the street in pamphlet form for two centavos as soon as they were written, and she also pinned on the walls the poems she liked most, so that she could read them aloud whenever she wished … Her declamatory passion was such that at times she continued to shout her recitation as they made love, and Florentino Ariza had to force a pacifier into her mouth, as one did with children to make them stop crying.”

—Gabriel García Márquez, from Love in the Time of Cholera (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

“A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.”

—Gabriel García Márquez

“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.”

—Gabriel García Márquez

Black & white rendering of “Rebirth” by Roy Surreal

“If I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him [or her]; it’s always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him [or her] or something he [or she] has read or been told.  Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says, “God help me from inventing when I sing.”  It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.  The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”

                                                                                                            —Gabriel García Márquez