The medicine chest of the soul - LitBash 26

Something on your chest, but you cannot quite figure out what it is? There is a cure: books. A library is "The medicine chest of the soul." Build your own library. Start with books by writers who were...

Born this week:

Dorothy L. Sayers, UK
"Trouble shared is trouble halved."

Che Guevara, Argentina
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves."

Augusto Roa Bastos, Paraguay
"Let us be free, the rest matters not."

Harriet Stowe, USA
"The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end."

Hermann Kant, Germany

Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy
"In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy."

Joyce Carol Oates, USA
"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."

Victor Nekrasov, Russia

Ivan Goncharov, Russia
"It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required."

Died this week:

Camille Lemonnier, Belgium

Osamu Dazai, Japan
"The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness."

Jerome K. Jerome, UK
"Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, UK
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

Ernst Weiss, Austria

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina
"All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

Hans Rudolf Kirk, Denmark

Elsa Triolet, France

Samuel Butler, UK
"The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore."

Maxim Gorky, Russia
"One has to be able to count, if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty."

James Matthew Barrie, UK
"Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves."

William Golding, UK
"The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth."