Hay, eye reed, two!

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Alright, new segment (not promising it'll be a frequent one): quotes I like from books I read.  I need to go through and find the stuff I highlighted on my Nook from the last book I read (a Paulo Coelho one), but I just finished this one last night so I guess I'll start here.  Why this book?  Um... not quite sure... to be honest, I don't like it.  It's a bit boring, weird, and (in case you can't tell) depressing.  I got it at a second hand bookshop and I've loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez ever since I had to read Chronicle of a Death Foretold in undergrad (which I also bought a cool old hardcover copy of at a second hand bookshop... the translation in the paperback version I had in undergrad was better though).  I think my next book may be One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I had actually started and really liked but got stuck somewhere around what must have been year fifty.  Anyway, quotes... here they are in the order the appear in the book.  They're not all necessary deep or meaningful.  Just beautiful.

"Morality, too, is a question of time, she would say with a malevolent smile, you'll see."

"I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York.  By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the the truth of their past lives."

"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."

"When the cathedral bells struck seven, there was a single, limpid star in the rose-colored sky, a ship called out a disconsolate farewell, and in my throat I felt the Gordian knot of all the loves that might have been and weren't."

"Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love."

"...I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.  I had spent more than fifteen years trying to translate the poems of Leopardi, and only on that afternoon did I have a profound sense of them: Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments."

"It took me half an hour to get in and another half hour to get out of a courtyard fragrant with fruit trees where a woman in distress blocked my way, looked into my eyes, and exclaimed:

   'I'm the one you're not looking for.'"

"'In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.'"

"Ah, my sad scholar, and she sighed with her invincible spirit, you disappear for two months and only come back to ask for illusions."

"At the end, with the Allegretto poco mosso, I was shaken by the stunning revelation that I was listening to the last concert fate would afford me before I died.  I did not feel sorrow or fear but an overwhelming emotion at having lied long enough to experience it."

"She smiled like a queen and grasped my hand.  Then I realized that this too was one of fate's vindications, and I did not lose the opportunity to pull out a thorn that had bothered me for so long.  I've dreamed of this moment for years, I said.  She did not seem to understand.  You don't say! she said.  And who are you?  I never knew if in fact she had forgotten or if it was the final revenge of her life."

"She pulled away in fright: What's the matter? Nothing, I said, trying to control my heart:

  'I'm trembling because of you.'"