He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the idea of continual self-reinvention throughout life.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggests that human existence is a process of continual rebirth and transformation. Instead of being defined solely by our initial birth, we are urged to continually evolve, learn, and reinvent ourselves throughout our lives, aligning our growth with our experiences and convictions.
In practice
This quote can be used as a motivational message in a personal development seminar.
He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
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.
She had the revelation one Sunday that while the other instruments played for everyone the violen played for her alone .
He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.
Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.
Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
(On entering Carmel) I came to save souls and especially to pray for priests.
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of these ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.
You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.
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