Happy Birthday Gabriel García Márquez: 10 Quotes To Live By

Magic realism was born today, 86 years ago.

Latin America's greatest contribution to literature depicts a world where the truth and the imagination exist side by side, in which ice is a mysterious thing never heard of and women just get blown away by the wind.

Exactly 86 years ago today, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born. He filled his life with words, first as a journalist and screenwriter, then as an acclaimed novelist. He has penned 25 books, both fiction and nonfiction, which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He guided us through a world of family mysteries and villager vendettas, a world in which no matter how hard life is, unyielding hope and the burning promise of love gets us to our golden years.

In celebration of Gabo's 86 years and the ones left to come, here are his ten commandments for a life well lived:

1. It is not true that people stop pursuing their dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

2. What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

3. A man knows he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

4. The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

5. A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.

6. He who awaits much can expect little.

7. No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

8. A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart.

9. Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

10.There is always something left to love.