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Monday, October 17, 2011

Possibly my favourite sentence of all time

Probably not, if I gave it serious thought and scrabbled through a pile of books. But I like it very much.

"Delirious with joy, Florentino Ariza spent the rest of the afternoon eating roses and reading the note letter by letter, over and over again, and the more he read the more roses he ate, and by midnight he had read it so many times and had eaten so many roses that his mother had to hold his head as if he were a calf and force him to swallow a dose of castor oil."
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love In The Time Of Cholera

I love the contrast between the utterly hopeless romantic, compulsively consuming flowers, and the brutal practicality of his mother, forcing him to swallow down his love, with castor oil.
And the language is deliciously sparse. It actually makes me feel a bit like I want to eat it. Or just bite someone.

My book is a relatively new copy, but page 79, is completely dog-eared.

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