Premjith Mathew

“MY MOST CONSTANT and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents. It’s a recurring dream which persists even now. What’s more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamed I’m in that huge old house. Not that I’ve gone back there but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason—as if I’d never left it. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door.”
― Gerald Martin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

“When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.”
― C.P. Cavafy

“Years later he would add that Italians have “no other aim than to live” because they “discovered a long time ago that there is only one life and that certainty has made them allergic to cruelty.”
― Gerald Martin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

“this was her first return to Aracataca since her husband, Gabriel Eligio García, took her away to live in Barranquilla, leaving little “Gabito” in the care of his maternal grandparents,”
― Gerald Martin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life