How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. (1.67)
Even as García Márquez presents to us the image of a couple completely unified in their dependency on one another, he reminds us that they're getting old and are therefore vulnerable.
Quote #2
Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. (1.68)
Most of the things Dr. Urbino and Fermina fight about don't really seem like that big a deal – here, matrimony seems like an exercise in triviality.
Quote #3
The truth was they both played a game, mythical and perverse, but for all that comforting: it was one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love. (1.70)
The way García Márquez talks about this couple's experience makes it sound pretty universal. Can fighting with your spouse be comforting? Even pleasurable? If not, why would so many couples do it?
Quote #4
Fermina Sánchez, however, settled on her desire with the blind determination of love when it is opposed, and she married him despite her family, with so much speed and so much secrecy that it seemed as if she had done so not for love but to cover over with a sacramental cloak some premature mistake. (2.101)
Hmmm…sound familiar? Lorenzo Daza completely misses the irony that his daughter's love affair is a repetition of the affair carried on by her mother…with him.
Quote #5
But in those solitary Masses they began to be aware that once again they were mistresses of their fate, after having renounced not only their family name but their own identity in exchange for a security that was no more than another of a bride's many illusions. They alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mother's tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality. And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. (4.113)
Whoa, Florentino paints a really bleak picture of marriage. The way he sees it, it seems that women give up their identities to marry men who they have to care for like children, then worry every day that their husbands might leave them. No wonder they're happy to be widows. Is there any truth to this, or is Florentino's perspective merely biased because of his love for the (now married) Fermina Daza?
Quote #6
It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. (4.126)
When you put it that way, marriage doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Somehow, though, it works – at least some of the time. What sort of reason, if not scientific, does it follow?
Quote #7
"The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror. The problem in marriage is learning to overcome boredom." (4.130)
A few years after her marriage to Dr. Urbino, Fermina Daza reflects on marriage and high society, realizing that both are merely social systems that one has to learn to navigate.
Quote #8
It was already complete, with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for the entire family. Among them, of course, was that of Doña Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle, and next to it her husband's, with a common epitaph: Together still in the peace of the Lord. (5.23)
Is marriage a contract that lasts into the afterlife? Will Fermina and Dr. Urbino still be together after they die? What if she falls in love with someone else after her husband passes away?
Quote #9
Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." (6.165)
Fermina seems a little surprised by the success of her marriage, especially because she never felt for her husband the same mushy gooshy feelings that she felt for Florentino when she was a teenager.