How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Florentino Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himself with the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the back room of the notions shop, and his letters became more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favorite poets from the Popular Library, which even at that time was approaching eighty volumes. (2.47)
Florentino's appetite for writing and reading is as exaggerated as his appetite for sex. We might call his collection of writings – the journals that he fills up, stacks of letters that he sends, and manuscripts that sit unpublished – an archive, a common trope in Latin American magical realism, and in García Márquez's novels in particular. The infiniteness of Florentino's archive threatens to drive him mad.
Quote #2
Reading had become his insatiable vice […] he read whatever came his way, as if it had been ordained by fate, and despite his many years of reading, he still could not judge what was good and what was not in all that he had read. The only thing clear to him was that he preferred verse to prose, and in verse he preferred love poems […] (2.63)
Florentino's inability to distinguish between good and bad prose means he's doomed to read everything that crosses his path. It's information overload – imagine trying to read everything on the Internet!
Quote #3
he wrote a letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in which the progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessary to know the writer to realize that he had signed his name with his last breath. (3.18)
In another example of the ways in which letters are read on multiple levels, Dr. Juvenal Urbino's father communicates with more than just words in the last letter that he writes to his family. His very handwriting is indicative of his failing health.
Quote #4
Florentino Ariza wrote everything with so much passion that even official documents seemed to be about love. His bills of lading were rhymed no matter how he tried to avoid it, and routine business letters had a lyrical spirit that diminished their authority. (4.7)
Florentino's inability to write a decent business letter is a great example of García Márquez's use of hyperbole. The idea that this character is cursed to write in verse so that even his bills come out in rhyme is one of the many exaggerations that contribute to a sense of the fantastic.
Quote #5
This was the period when he spent his free time in the Arcade of the Scribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports. (4.9)
Why would two people who don't know how to read choose to send each other love letters as a way of expressing their feelings? When Florentino substitutes his own feelings for Fermina into the letters he's writing on behalf of others, it calls attention to the fact that the letter itself is full of symbolic meaning. The contents of the letter don't really matter that much, in this case.
Quote #6
She had put into it all the fury of which she was capable, her cruelest words, the most wounding, most unjust vilifications, which still seemed minuscule to her in light of the enormity of the offense. It was the final act in a bitter exorcism through which she was attempting to come to terms with her new situation. (6.1)
Fermina has never been much of a writer – her teenage letters to Florentino were always much shorter and less expressive than his – but this time her letter is extremely heartfelt. In fact, it's a kind of "exorcism" of all the negative feelings she's experienced since her husband's death.
Quote #7
All that interested him was that the letter, in and of itself, gave him the opportunity, and even recognized his right, to respond. Even more: it demanded that he respond. (6.38)
The insulting letter that Florentino receives from Fermina doesn't bother him. The content of the letter isn't that significant – the important thing is that the presence of the letter itself gives Florentino the opportunity to respond and strike up a dialogue with the object of his affection. So the letter sort of serves as a symbol that communicates more to Florentino than the actual words it contains.
Quote #8
It was a six-page letter, unlike any he had ever written before. It did not have the tone, or the style, or the rhetorical air of his early years of love, and his argument was so rational and measured that the scent of a gardenia would have been out of place. In a certain sense it was his closest approximation to the business letters he had never been able to write. (6.45)
The first letter that Florentino sends to Fermina is perhaps the most important expression of his love in the history of their relationship, and yet it has none of the flowery, lyrical style of all of his previous writings of any sort, which had always had the tone of a love letter. This letter is the beginning of a "rational" and "measured" explanation of why Fermina should be with Florentino. You almost expect it to contain a flow chart.
Quote #9
"After all, letters belong to the person who write them. Don't you agree?"
He made a bold move.
"I do," he said. "That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended." (6.86)
Because so much of the novel is based around letter-writing, the etiquette of sending and receiving letters becomes very significant. Even though Fermina doesn't respond to Florentino's letters, the fact that she keeps them instead of returning them sends a message. Here, Florentino implies that, because she has not returned their letters, they are embroiled in some sort of "affair."