• Enid Bagnold was born on 10/27/1889. “The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age-what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.”
• Dylan Thomas was born on 10/27/1914. “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
• Sylvia Plath was born on 10/27/1932. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
• Rex Stout died on 10/27/1975. “I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”
• Ted Hughes died on 10/28/1998. “Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.”
• James Boswell was born on 10/29/1740. “A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.”
• Jean Giraudoux was born on 10/29/1882. “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on 10/30/1751. “The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
• Ezra Pound was born on 10/30/1885. “A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”
• Ella Wheeler Wilcox died on 10/30/1919. “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.”
• Rose Macaulay died on 10/30/1958. “Love’s a disease. But curable.”
• John Evelyn died on 10/31/1620. “Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world.”
• John Keats was born on 10/31/1795. “A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.”
• Natalie Clifford Barney was born on 10/31/1876. “Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

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[All photographs are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and are in the Public Domain.]