If you love reading books, you haven’t read anything yet till Love in The Time of Cholera. If you don’t love reading books then Love in The Time of Cholera will turn your taste buds upside down, inside out and backside front.

I never shed a tear while reading a book, well until recently… It’s astonishing that what made me cry was not the riveting tale of the different kinds of love and struggles narrated over an entire century but Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s power of giving a breath of life and reference to each and every detail, memory, person, thing and feeling.

The rare beauty of the writer’s evocative literature style supersedes the book’s powerful love story but don’t get me wrong, it is that love of the “crowned goddess” that inspired this amazing tale of the weak while at the same time, brave hearted … Here are some of  my favourite quotes from the book, enjoy!

1. “They were not capable of living for even an instant without the other and the capacity diminished as their age increased.”

2. Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

3. “The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.”

4. “On Christmas eve he wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the hallucination that it was he and not God who had been born that night.”

5. “All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of Cholera. The doctor prescribed infusion of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a change of air so he could find consolation in distance but the man longed for just the opposite, to enjoy his martyrdom.”

6. One comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’, willing or unwillingly, loses them forever.

7. “From that time, she would still feel a belated longing for a letter that never arrived.”

8. “Worldly goods: security, order, happiness, contiguous numbers that, once they were added together, might resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, and these doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.”

9. The problem with marriage is it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning after breakfast.

10. Love, no matter else it might be, is a natural talent. You are either born knowing how or you never know.

BONUS: Check out my other post on Gabriel: Living to Tell the Tale – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Book Review)

I believe that friendship in the same measurements as love is about re-igniting that flame that burns deep within an individual so thank you Wanjeri for the book.