Memories of My Melancholy Whores by García Márquez

Ref: García Márquez (2004). Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Alfred A. Knopf, NY. 

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Summary

  • “The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

  • On his 90th birthday, an un-named man decides to celebrate by taking the virginity of a young prostitute. Although he never has sex with the girl, he spends his 90th year sleeping at her side, and falling in love, which he expresses through his journalism and his struggle with his inevitable death.

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Misc Quotes

  • “I’m ugly, shy, and anachronistic. But by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite. Until today, when I have resolved to tell of my own free will just what I’m like, if only to ease my conscious.”

  • “I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.”

  • “The truth is that the first changes are so slow they pass almost unnoticed, and you go on seeing yourself as you always were, from the inside, but others observe you from the outside.”

  • “Those erudite women who viewed marriage as a condition more ridiculous than sacred.”

  • “The world is moving ahead. Yes, I said, it’s moving ahead, but it’s revolving around the sun.”

  • “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.”

  • “Twist the neck of the swan”: To write from my heart and not have anyone notice my tears.

  • “Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”

  • “I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”

  • “Peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

  • “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”

  • “One ages more and with more intensity in pictures than in reality.”

  • “He was an elephantine, taciturn Lebanese who opened the doors to his kingdom in the illusory hope of being an example to the world.”

  • “Jealousy knows more than truth does.”

  • “In the end, it is impossible not to become what others think you are”-Julius Caesar.

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