"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good"
About this Quote
The phrase "heart's memory" smuggles emotion into the role we usually assign to the mind. It implies that recollection serves desire: to keep love possible, grief bearable, the past narratable. "Eliminates" is brutal, almost surgical, suggesting amputation rather than gentle forgetting. Then "magnifies" swings the other way - not truth, but enlargement, the past blown up to match our longing. The sentence compresses a whole theory of nostalgia: you don't just look back, you curate.
Placed against Marquez's wider preoccupations - time that loops, love that outlasts logic, lives rearranged by storytelling - the quote reads like a key to his fiction's emotional engine. His characters often persist by mythologizing: turning disappointment into destiny, loss into legend. The intent isn't to excuse that tendency, but to show how easily it becomes a private form of magical realism: the supernatural act of making the past kinder than it was, just so the present doesn't collapse under its weight.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera), Gabriel García Márquez, novel (1985); English trans. 1988. Passage commonly cited from the novel: "The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good." |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. (2026, January 16). The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-hearts-memory-eliminates-the-bad-and-132723/
Chicago Style
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. "The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-hearts-memory-eliminates-the-bad-and-132723/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-hearts-memory-eliminates-the-bad-and-132723/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.













