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The General in His Labyrinth

Book by Gabriel García Márquez · 11 quotes · Bolivar, Loneliness, Alaska

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The General in His Labyrinth Quotes

“He had been a reader of imperturbable voracity during the respites after battles and the rests after love, but a reader without order or method. He read at any hour, in whatever light was available, sometimes strolling under the trees, sometimes on horseback under the equatorial sun, sometimes in dim coaches rattling over cobbled pavements, sometimes swaying in the hammock as he dictated a letter. A bookseller in Lima had been surprised at the abundance and variety of works he selected from a general catalogue that listed everything from Greek philosophers to a treatise on chiromancy. In his youth he read the Romantics under the influence of his tutor, Simón Rodríguez, and he continued to devour them as if he were reading himself and his own idealistic, intense temperament. They were impassioned readings that marked him for the rest of his life. In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times. The bookcases in the various houses he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.”

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“Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!" "Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded: "Just look at me.”

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“- Hoje, em circunstâncias iguais, não me tremeria a voz para dar a mesma ordem, nem os europeus teriam autoridade moral para me censurar, pois se há uma história regada de sangue, de indignidade, de injustiças, é a história da Europa. (...) Então nos façam o favor de não nos dizer mais o que devemos fazer. Não tentem nos ensinar como devemos ser, não tentem nos tornar iguais a vocês, não pretendam que façamos bem em vinte anos o que vocês fizeram tão mal em dois mil.”

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