One Hundred Years of Solitude

Solitude isn't the absence of people. It's the presence of everything unsaid.

Many years later, facing the firing squad, memory in that family runs backwards.

The ice. That's the whole engine of the book: a boy told the world's greatest miracle was frozen water.

Insomnia wiped the town's words off things. Naming is load-bearing.

Remedios rose with the sheets and nobody in Macondo found it strange. Best funeral weather ever.

The banana company massacre and everyone's polite forgetting. My history teacher never mentioned it.

Aureliano made little gold fish, sold them, melted them, made them again. I know exactly what my fish are.

Pilar read cards for a hundred years and understood everyone but the Buendías' exits.

Rains that lasted four years, eleven months and two days. Grief keeps a calendar.

Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude don't get a second on earth. He wrote the sentence first.