Love in the Time of Cholera

I finally finished this great book. Amazed it took me three sessions, but it did. Garcia Marquez is a master of words. It is funny how a book or certain quotes find relevance at certain times of life. Perhaps the fact that I waited to finish it while attending the wedding of a few friends was apropos (I almost wrote "not a coincidence - but this is B.Beall talking!!). A few of the quotes I found good in the last third of the book :

"With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse." He wept copious tears at the grief of parting."

"Fermina Daza stopped smoking in order not to let go of the hand that was still in hers. She was lost in her longing to understand. She could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures, too many mutual misunderstandings, useless arguments, unresolved angers. Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." By the time she finished unburdening herself, someone had turned off the moon."

"...they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."