A Life of Wonder

A few years ago I went to Cartagena, Colombia where Marquez has his home. I joked with my girlfriend that we would run into him. And it just so happened that he almost ran over us. We were taking pictures outside of his colorful house when the garage door open and his driver nearly ran us over. Reclining in the passenger seat, Marquez looked on at us with amused patience.

His works are brilliant, beautiful, and magical. And every time I travel to Colombia they come alive for me in the town cathedrals, the local town personalities, the granddaughters whispering truth to their grandmothers; the wild birds; children playing soccer near men sharing stories….at noon the church bells ring and the marketplaces breath…and his novels live my veins like music.
A few quotes I love:

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“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.”

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”