Arcadio found the formality of death rediculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.
Men demand much more than you think," she would tell her enigmatically. "There's a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.
... that the past is one lie, and the memory has no returning, becouse every old spring is beyond retrieve, and even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth...
Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if He really believe that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications.
That would be fine, she said If we’re alone, we’ll leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.
Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained.
It was simply a way of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience.
The captain gave the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.
He was weary of the uncertainty, of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when.
... a woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion."It's coming," she finally explained. "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.
Because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.
We have still not had a death. A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground." he said."If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die" replied Ursula with a soft firmness.
That was the way he always was, alien to the existence of his sons, partly because he considered childhood as a period of mental insufficiency, and partly because he was always too absorbed in his fantastic speculations.
They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.
Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents' small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.
But underneath it all she could not conceive that the boy the gypsies took away was the same lout who would eat half a suckling pig for lunch and whose flatulence withered flowers.
But when she saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simple-mindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long.
Science has eliminated distance, Melquíades proclaimed. In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.
How strange men are.' she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. 'They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayer books as gifts.
Let me soap you," he murmured."Thank you for your good intentions," she said, "but my two hands are quite enough.""Even if it's just your back," the foreigner begged."That would be silly," she said. "People never soap their backs.
But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.
Jose Arcadio Buendia took his wife's words literally. He looked out the window and saw the barefoot children in the sunny garden and he had the impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Ursula's spell.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia smiled at her the same way as when he had first seen her with the bandage on that remote morning when he had come back to Macondo condemned to death. "How awful," he said, "the way time passes!
With her waiting she had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact.
She answered him sincerely that she would never marry a man who was so simple that he had wasted almost an hour and even went without lunch just to see a woman taking a bath.
Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mother gives birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
