Laura

“He tired to reconstruct in his imagination the annihilated splendor of the banana company town, whose dry swimming pool was filled to the brim with rotting men's and woman's shoes, and in the houses of which, destroyed by rye grass, he found the skeleton of a German shepherd dog still tied to a ring by a steel chain and a telephone that was ringing, ringing, ringing until he picked it up and an anguished and distant woman spoke in English, and he said yes, that the strike was over, that three thousand dead people had been thrown into the sea, that the banana company had left, and that Macondo finally had peace after many years.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“[...] she had given up the pernicious custom of keeping track of her age and she went on living in the static and marginal time of memories, in a future perfectly revealed and established, beyond the futures disturbed by the insidious snares and suppositions of her cards.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Poor great-great-grandmother," Amaranta Ursula said. "She died of old age."
Ursula was startled.
"I'm alive!" she said.
"You can see," Amaranta Ursula said, suppressing her laughter, "that she's not even breathing."
"I'm talking!" Ursula shouted.
"She can't even talk," Aureliano said. "She died like a little cricket."
Then Ursula gave into the evidence. "My God," she exclaimed in a low voice. "So this is what it's like to be dead.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera