Literature will set you free: LitBash 22

Literature will set you free: "A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them." Here's a collection of writers from around the world who were...

Born this week:

Juan Rulfo, Mexico
"No one knows better than I do how far heaven is, but I also know all the shortcuts. The secret is to die, when you want to, and not when He proposes. Or else to force Him to take you before your time."

Henri Barbusse, France
"Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide."

Gunnar Gunnarsson, Iceland

Honore de Balzac, France
"I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity."

Hector Malot, France

Sigrid Undset, Norway
"I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes."

Wolfgang Borchert, Germany

Gerard de Nerval, France
"He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue."

Arthur Conan Doyle, UK
"The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished."

Died this week:

Irwin Shaw, USA

Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais, France
"Drinking when not thirsty and making love all the time, madam, is all that distinguishes us from other animals."

Nathaniel Hawthorne, USA
"In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago."

George Meredith, UK
"Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered."

William Saroyan, USA
"I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been."

James Boswell, UK
"He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it."

Jose Marti, Cuba
"A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them."

Ogden Nash, USA
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of."

Klaus Mann, Gremany

Victor Hugo, France
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea."

Jules Renard, France
"No matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them."