"You're a great man, General, greater than anyone," she told him. "But love is still too big for you." - Gabriel García Márquez

"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.

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.