This week’s Quote of the Fortnight comes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” a thrilling novella about the murder of Santiago Nasar and the small town that is all too involved.

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit. “He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his mother told me, told me twenty seven years later, recalling the details of that distressing Monday.

pg. 3