The Dead Writers Round-Up: April 13th-15th

Jean de La Fontaine died on 4/13/1695. “Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.” (Fables)
Sameul Beckett was born on 4/13/1906. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” (More Pricks than Kicks; Murphy; Waiting for Godot; Endgame; Molloy; Ohio Impromptu)
Eudora Welty was born on 4/13/1909. “A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.” (A Worn Path; A Curtain of Green; The Robber Bridegroom; The Ponder Heart)
Thomas Otway died on 4/14/1685. “Clocks will go as they are set, but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain.” (Venice Preserv’d; The Orphan; The Atheist)
James Branch Cabell was born on 4/14/1879. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.” (The Eagle’s Shadow; Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice; The Biography of Manuel; The Nightmare Has Triplets)
Rachel Carson died on 4/14/1964. “The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.” (The Edge of the Sea; Silent Spring)
Simone de Beauvoir died on 4/14/1986. “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.” (The Blood of Others; All Men Are Mortal; The Second Sex)
Henry James was born on 4/15/1843. “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” (Roderick Hudson; Washington Square; The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; Daisy Miller; A Bundle of Letters; What Maisie Knew; The Wings of the Dove; The Turn of the Screw; Paste; The Beast in the Jungle)
Bliss Carman was born on 4/15/1861. “Indifference may not wreck a man’s life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in the long run.” (Low Tide on Grand Pre: A Book of Lyrics; The Rough Rider: And Other Poems; The Vengeance of Noel Brassard; Far Horizons)
Matthew Arnold died on 4/15/1888. “The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.” (Essays in Criticism: First Series; Culture and Anarchy; Tristram and Iseult; Dover Beach; On Translating Homer)
Jean-Paul Sartre died on 4/15/1980. “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” (Nausea; No Exit; The Age of Reason; Search for a Method; Critique of Dialectical Reason; Black Orpheus)
Jean Genet died on 4/15/1986. “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.” (Our Lady of the Flowers; The Thief’s Journal; The Maids; The Galley; A Song of Love; The Parade)
Edward Gorey died on 4/15/2000. “My favorite journey is looking out the window.” (The Unstrung Harp; The Doubtful Guest; The Gashlycrumb Tinies; The Sopping Thursday; The Broken Spoke)