Gabriel García Márquez

   In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Love in the Time of Cholera

bella <3

"take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can," she said to him, "because these things don't last your whole life." 

he was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. 

she was married forever after at the main altar of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, and without a single charitable thought for Florentino Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him to forgetting. 

the drama of Florentino Ariza while he was a clerk for the River Company of the Carribbean was that he could not avoid lyricism because he was always thinking about Fermina Daza, and he had never learned to write without thinking about her.

in any case, the german was correct in regard to what he had thought about least, which was that Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

they were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion. 

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