August 3, 2015

Today is the birthday of the following people:

Hayden Carruth (1921 – 2008):

“A poem is not an expression, nor

it is an object. Yet it somewhat

partakes of both. What a poem is

Is never to be known, for which I

have learned to be grateful.”

and

“Why speak of the use

of poetry? Poetry

is what uses us.”

P.D. James (1920 - 2014):

“Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.”

and

“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”

and

“Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.”

and

“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.”

Leon Uris (1924 – 2003):

“Love can't mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That's the only real path to love.”

Steven Millhauser (1943 - ):

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”

and

“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”

August 2, 2015

Good Morning! Today is the birthday of the following people who said:

James Baldwin (1924 – 1987):

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

and

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

and

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

and

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be”

Benjamin Barber (1939 - ):

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.”

Isabel Allende (1942 - ):

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”

and

“Write what should not be forgotten.”

and

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”

and

“Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.”

Caleb Carr (1955 - ):

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”

and

“Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.”