Love in the Time of Cholera Death Quotes

Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.  (1.3)

Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.  (1.14)

Although he refused to retire, he was aware that he was called in only for hopeless cases, but he considered this a form of specialization too.  (1.24)

From youthful enthusiasm he had moved to a position that he himself defined as fatalistic humanism:  "Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain."  (1.24)

He was awakened by sadness.  Not the sadness he had felt that morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final afternoons.  (1.105)

At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.  (1.106)

Dr. Urbino caught the parrot […] But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.  (1.113)

On the third day a mule maddened by gadflies fell into a ravine with its rider, dragging along the entire line, and the screams of the man and his pack of seven animals tied to one another continued to rebound along the cliffs and gullies for several hours after the disaster, and continued to resound for years and years in the memory of Fermina Daza. […] she did not think of the poor dead mule driver or his mangled pack but of how unfortunate it was that the mule she was riding had not been tied to the others as well.  (2.92)

"If I died now," he said, "you would hardly remember me when you are my age."
He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the cool shadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake, but the boy did not see them.  (3.20)

He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and saw that his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza.  He shrugged his shoulders.  The he belched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeral bells.  (3.51)

The evil lie about the pavilion of consumptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inconceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a consequence might die before her husband.  But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volition he took another step toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the one to die first.  It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality.  (5.106)

A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed.  (5.106)

Florentino shuddered:  as she herself had said, she had the sour smell of old age […] It was the smell of fermentation, which he had perceived in his oldest lovers and they had detected in him.  (6.188)

The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost.  Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.  (348)