Quote of the Day (Gabriel García Márquez, on an August Visit to a Mother’s Grave)

“She returned to the island on Friday, August 16, on the three o’clock ferry. She was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, plain flat shoes without socks, carrying a satin parasol and a handbag, and her only luggage was a beach bag. In the row of taxis at the dock she went straight to an old model corroded by the sea air. The driver welcomed her warmly and took her jolting across the destitute village, with its mud-walled shacks, palm-thatch roofs, and streets of burning sand beside a sea in flames. He had to swerve around undaunted pigs and naked children pretending to be toreadors. On the outskirts of the village he drove down an avenue of royal palms where the beaches and the tourist hotels were, between the open sea and a lagoon inhabited by blue herons. At last he stopped outside the oldest, most dilapidated hotel.”—Colombian novelist, journalist, and Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), Until August, translated by Anne McLean (2024)