Today is the birthday of the following people:
Bill Bryson (1951 - ):
“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
and
“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
Jean Sibelius (1865 –
1957):
“I often conduct an
orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the
violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.”
Diego Rivera (1886 –
1957):
“The artist must try
to raise the level of taste of the masses, not debase himself to the level of
unformed and impoverished taste.”
James Thurber (1864 –
1961):
“Let us not look back
in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.”
and
“Boys are beyond the
range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages
of 18 months and 90 years.”
and
“Don't get it right,
get it written.”
and
“Love is what you've
been through with somebody.”
Delmore Schwartz
(1913 – 1966):
“Time is the school
in which we learn,
Time is the fire in
which we burn.”
John Banville (1945 -
):
“The past beats
inside me like a second heart.”
and
“To take possession
of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.”
and
“Where I went, no one
could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.”
Sinéad O'Connor (1966
- ):
“When you're young,
you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and
acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of
swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of
direction.”
Dominic Monaghan (1976
- ):
“The term 'geek' for
me is like you having a passion, interest in something that is unabashed and
you don't care if people think it's not cool. You think it's cool and that's
your thing.”
