The Dead Writers Round-Up: August 8th-10th

  • Sara Teasdale was born on 8/8/1884. “I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.” (Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems; Helen of Troy and Other Poems; Rivers to the Sea; Love Songs)
  • Shirley Jackson died on 8/8/1965. “I delight in what I fear.” (Hangsaman; The Haunting of Hill House; We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Life Among the Savages; many, many short stories)
  • Philip Larkin was born on 8/9/1922. “Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.” (The North Ship; The Less Deceived; The Whitsun Weddings; Jill)
  • Hermann Hesse died on 8/9/1962. “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” (Peter Camenzind; Gertrud; Siddhartha; Der Steppenwolf)
  • Adela Rogers St. Johns died on 8/10/1988. “Happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you’re lucky.” (A Free Soul; Tell No Man; The Honeycomb; many, many screenplays)
Sara Teasdale, July 11, 1919, by Arnold Genthe.

Sara Teasdale, July 11, 1919, by Arnold Genthe.

Hermann Hesse, 1929

Hermann Hesse, 1929.

Ten Quotes and a Photograph in Honor of Henry David Thoreau’s Birthday

Happy 196th Birthday, Mr. Thoreau!

  • “It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.”
  • “Simplify, simplify.”
  • “The world is wider than our views of it.”
  • “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.”
  • “Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”
Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

  • “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
  • “Things do not change; we change.”
  • “One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.”
  • “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
  • “It’s not worth our while to let our imperfections disturb us always.”