Quote by Gabriel García Márquez: “A person doesn't die when he should, but when he can.”

Death does not follow a logical or just schedule — people cling to life long past suffering, or leave without warning when things seem good. García Márquez is observing that mortality is indifferent to human notions of timing, fairness, or readiness.

García Márquez accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 1982 in Stockholm, the same year he published Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Latin America was experiencing a wave of military dictatorships and political violence, and themes of death, fate, and the absurdity of power ran throughout his work.

Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, widely regarded as the father of magical realism in literature. His 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude transformed Latin American and world literature, blending myth, history, and the everyday into an entirely new fictional universe.