March 28, 2014

Good Morning!

Today is the birthday of Maxim Gorky (1838 – 1936) who said:

“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.”

and

“Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.”

and

“You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.”

It is also the birthday of Nelson Algren (1909 – 1981) who said:

“Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

and

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

Birthday greetings to Bohumil Hrabal (1914 – 1997) who said:

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out.”

and

“I can be by myself because I'm never lonely, I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

A very happy birthday to Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928 - ) who said:

“A great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle, but it is also a struggle that has to be waged intelligently.”

And feliz cumpleaños to Mario Vargas Llosa (1936 - ) who said:

“Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.” 

and

“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.”