Active Reading-Quotes: Chapter One

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

-You're probably wondering why I have chosen this quote being that it is the first quote in the book. I really admired the quote because it just sounded so bizarre. Discovering ice? It just seems weird, knowing that we look at ice everyday and it's not really a wondere to us because we're so used to being around it. Colonel Aureliano is Jose Arcadio Buendia's son and one day the annual gypsies brought ice with them and Jose Arcadio Buendia was fascinated for when he arrived to found Macondo he had a dream that it was a village made of mirror houses.

"They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew only their own language. handsome specimens with oily skins and intellegent hands, whose hands and music sowed a panic of uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to the sound of a tambourine, and trained monkey who read minds, and the multiple-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that Jose Arcadio Buendia must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he could remember them all."

-This quote is about gypsies. Specifically, the gypsies that come annually in March with their new discoveries. They are the ones who brought the ice to Macondo and the same gypsies from which Jose Arcadio Buendia bought the magnets to discover gold.