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

This sentence is one of the most famous opening lines in world literature. The story of Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing the firing squad serves as a frame story for the first half of the book. It also establishes the way that time will unfold non-chronologically throughout the novel.

“Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon."

During José Arcadio Buendía's failed attempt to find a direct route from Macondo to the capital, his group of explorers comes upon the skeleton of this Spanish ship. It serves as a symbol for Spanish colonialism in Colombia.

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

José Arcadio Buendía, one of the founders of Macondo, insists that the town is not firmly rooted until someone dies there. This statement foreshadows both the death of Melquíades and the deaths of the entire Buendía family.