I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the absence of deep friendships in the speaker's life and the notion of lost connections with those who have passed away.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez explains a sense of isolation and loss, indicating that he never experienced profound friendships. The mention of friends being in New York, a metaphorical representation of death, suggests that these connections are only remembered in the context of the past, highlighting the sentiment of tragic solitude and the complexities of human relationships.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of friendships, one might quote Marquez to emphasize the value of deep connections.
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.
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Hello, friends.' I've had fun with that expression to satisfy the cynics, but it comes from the heart, and I don't apologize for it. Like my dad - for whom I designed the expression during the 2002 PGA Championship, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease - I've never met a stranger.
Friendship that insists upon agreement on all matters is not worth the name. Friendship to be real must ever sustain the weight of honest differences, however sharp they be.
They might not need me; but they might. I'll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.
I think about how much depends upon a best friend. Then you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not.
Be thou the first true merit to befriend, his praise is lost who stays till all commend.
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