Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion.

On March 6, 2014, beloved Colombian and Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez will turn eighty-seven. The storyteller is revered for his many contributions, but most memorably One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). On this occasion of his birthday, we're turning to seven of our favorite Márquez quotations.

1. "It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." From The Paris Review Interviews, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69. The author spoke in mostly Spanish, and his two sons shared in translating.

2. "The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude" / "El secreto de una buena vejez no es otra cosa que un pacto honrado con la soledad." From One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." From Living to Tell the Tale.

4. "Loves becomes greater and more noble in calamity." / "El amor se hace más grande y noble en la calamidad."

5. "There's no medicine that cures what happiness doesn't." / "No hay medicina que cure lo que no cura la felicidad."

6. "The memory of the heart eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; thanks to this artifice, we are able to bear the past." / "La memoria del corazón elimina los malos recuerdos y magnifica los buenos, y gracias a ese artificio, logramos sobrellevar el pasado." From Love in the Time of Cholera.

7. “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.” From Memories of My Melancholy Whores