Out of Egypt:

"You want to get quotable. Let's get QUOTABLE!"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is now my favorite writer. Why, o why did I wait so long? Not sure if I would put Catch-22 up there on the list, though. If I were to make a favorite novel list, Karamazov would be near the top.

Anyway...quotes (and I'm not even finished with the book yet). These are all totally decontextualized - presented without proper antecedents and haphazardly chosen, but hopefully will give you an idea of how much I love this book.

"Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake."

"The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escaped irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said Macondo and another larger one on the main street that said God exists."

"She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persisted, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food."

"Aureliano, for his part, found in her the justification that he needed to live. He worked all day in his workshop and Remedios would bring him a cup of black coffee in the middle of the morning. They would both visit the Moscotes every night. Aureliano would play endless games of dominoes with his father-in-law while Remedios chatted with her sisters or talked to her mother about more important things."

"Three days later they were married during the five-o`clock mass. Jose Arcadio had gone to Pietro Crespi's store the day before. He found him giving a zither lesson and did not draw him aside to speak to him. "I'm going to marry Rebeca," he told him. Pietro Crespi turned pale, gave the zither to one of his pupils, and dismissed the class."