Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it.

Gabriel García Márquez was a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who used his upbringing in an emotionally and financially strained family in politically tumultuous Colombia as inspiration for his later works. He was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature, and he’s perhaps best known for his highly lauded “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” published in 1967. This quote appears in the leaflet of his 2002 autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” The short reflection on perspective and memory summarizes the memoir’s overarching theme of observing the human condition both in and outside oneself. As is the case in “One Hundred Years,” Márquez used much of his writing to explore the idea of cyclical behavioral and social patterns one may be doomed to repeat — and the opportunity to break these cycles with shifted, analytical perspectives of ourselves and each other.