Cholera Quotes

“Gli bastò un interrogatorio insidioso, prima a lui e poi alla madre, per constatare un'ennesima volta che i sintomi dell'amore sono gli stessi del colera.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.

Love becomes greater and nobler and mightier in calamity.

We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a women decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root. There is no god worth worrying about.

Let time pass and we will see what it brings.

Humanity, like the armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

Those of us who make the rules have the greatest obligation to abide by them.

I don't believe in God but I am afraid of him.
It's better to arrive in time than to be invited.

Unfaithful but not disloyal.

Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent.

Nobody teaches life anything.

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

There is no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid and dangerous, than a poet.

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

One comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays and whoever doesn't use them for whatever reason, one's own and someone else's, willingly or unwillingly, looses them forever.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

“March 1898

What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul.

They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike!

They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels.

I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring...

I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive.

Their vitreous eyes were looking at me...

I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting.

Am I to be haunted by masks now?”
― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas

“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”
― Steven Johnson

“The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.”
― Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866

“...and yet, the only thing about this year, he thinks, the only times that he has been completely honest with himself are on the nights he's spent here. Only among the crowd of the failed has he felt comfortable living inside his own defeat.”
― Sheri Holman

“His mother knew before he told her because he lost his voice and his appetite, and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed. But when he began to wait to the answer to his first letter, his anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit. He became disoriented and suffered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera….because he had the weak pulse, the hoarse breathing, and the pale perspiration of a dying man. But his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“The cholera was much more devastating to the black population, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for color or background.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“My Watch Is Ended.”
― John Snow, Cholera

“Mr. Maclean, the secretary of the Central Board of Health, on hearing that there was to be so large an assemblage of pure Scotchmen at the Freemason's, called upon Cuff, and told him it was his duty to guard againt all chances of infection. Mr. Cuff was directed to wash the walls thoroughly with chloride of lime, both before and after the meeting. The hall has, we are informed, undergone a complete fumegation, so that there is no cause to fear that ill consequences will arise from the circumstance of so extensive a body of our fellow-countrymen having met together.”
― William Maginn, Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, Volume 5