Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. It tells the epic story of a fifty-year love triangle between Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza, and Doctor Juvenal Urbino, and begins in the late 19th century.
Despite how it may sound, this isn’t your typical love story – it is a tale of unrequited love and a beautiful explanation of how complex and nuanced love can be. Combined with Gabriel García Márquez’s signature magical realism, the novel gives a graceful nod to the idea of how noble it is to suffer in the name of love.
The story begins with Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza which fall in love in their youth. The two spend a lot of time daydreaming about how they will live together in the future and eventually grow old together.
Unfortunately, sometimes fate doesn’t abide by the wishes of mortals, which is why their lives slowly take different turns. Florentino never stops loving Fermina and patiently waits for her through her marriage, raising her children, and even her husband’s death, hoping to end up with her eventually.
There is no worse feeling than the realization that the person you love most in the world doesn’t feel the same way about you. The most painful part is that even though you would give everything for that person, there is nothing you can do to make them reciprocate your feelings.
I hope the following quotes manage to convey even a bit of this hauntingly beautiful story to you.
Love In Time Of Cholera Quotes
1. “He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster”
2. “I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans.”
3. “Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”
4. “He was aware he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be an obstacle to their inventing true love.”
5. “He was beginning to defer his problems in the hope that death would resolve them .”
6. “Love was always love, anytime anyplace but it was more solid the closer it came to death .”
7. “That casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that had still not ended half a century later.”
8. “There are things you do only for love.”
9. “She searched the truth with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it .”
10. “By virtue of marrying a man she does not love for money. That’s the lowest kind of whore.”
11. “He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”
12. “Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”
13. “One could be happy not only without love but despite it.”
Best Love Quotes From The Book Love In Time Of Cholera
14. “It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself. ”
15. “The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”
16. “Think of love as a state of grace not as a means to anything… but an end in itself.”
17. “It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.”
18. “To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
19. “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
20. “He is ugly and sad… but he is all love.”
21. “Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”
22. “She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love .”
23. “She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.”
24. “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.”
25. “Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.”
The Symptoms Of Love Quotes By Gabriel Garciq Marquez
26. “Little by little he idolized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her.”
27. “The symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera.”
28. “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.”
29. “It was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.”
30. “Love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”
31. “If they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”
32. “There is no law, human or divine, that this man has not ignored.”
33. “Whatever happened to one love affected all the other loves through out the world.”
34. “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”
35. “Nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.”
36. “And she realized very soon that the desire to forget him was the strongest inducement for remembering him.”
37. “It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”
38. “She said: “Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.”
39. “The night was over, for he did not dare to play forbidden games with a woman who had proven too many times that she knew the dark side of the moon.”
40. “Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancor.”
Last Quotes on Love
41. “Once, during a party game, he had been asked how he defined himself, and he had said: “I am a man who dresses in the dark.”
42. “Her clear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her wedding portrait, but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character and diligence.”
43. “Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband’s step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.”
44. “Before he knelt down to pray before the altar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere: “I think I am going to die.” She did not even blink when she replied. “That would be best,” she said. “Then we could both have some peace.”
45. “We, who make the rules, are, also, the most obliged to fulfill them.”
46. “Love in trouble strengthens and refines.”
47. “Too much love for this is equally bad as the shortage of love.”
48. “For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and any place, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”
49. “Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries.”
50. “Requited love had given him a confidence and strength he had never known before, and he was so efficient in his work.”
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