• 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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• Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 10/21/1772. “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
• Jack Kerouac died on 10/21/1969. “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
• Kingsley Amis died on 10/22/1995. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” (Lucky Jim)
• Sarah Josepha Hale was born on 10/24/1788. “There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.”
• Denise Levertov was born on 10/24/1923. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.”
• Geoffrey Chaucer died on 10/25/1400. “There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.”
• Frank Norris died on 10/25/1902. “The function of the novelist…is to comment upon life as he sees it.”
• John Berryman was born on 10/25/1914. “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
• Mary McCarthy died on 10/25/1989. “We are the hero of our own story.”

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