Government can cause you to disappear without a trace | LitBash 31

"Governments can cause you to disappear without a trace." It will be lonely out there, so be sure to prepare yourself - collect books to help pass the time. Start with authors who were...

Born this week:

William Makepeace Thackeray, UK
"Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb."

Ramon de Mesonero Romanos, Spain

Ferenc Mora, Hungary

Archibald Cronin, UK

Claude Aveline, France

Robert Pinget, France

Leonid Sobolev, Russia

Ernest Hemingway, USA
"God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature."

John Gardner, USA

Sandor Brody, Hungary

Raymond Chandler, USA
"Don’t ever write anything you don’t like yourself and if you do like it, don’t take anyone’s advice about changing it. They just don’t know."

Alexandre Dumas, France
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man’s disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written forms or documents may defeat their wishes. It has always been so and always will be. Governments change yet they remain all alike."

Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Russia

Henrik Pontoppidan, Denmark

Edward Dunsany, Ireland
"I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that swart old city."

Died this week:

Jane Austen, UK
"Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted."

Gilberto de Melo Freyre, Brasil

Curzio Malaparte, Italy

Rene Bazin, France

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Italy
"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Witold Gombrowicz, Poland
"I thought that this auction with other nations for geniuses and heroes, for merits and cultural achievement, was really quite awkward from the point of view of propaganda tactics because with our half-French Chopin and not quite native Copernicus, we cannot compete with the Italians, French, Germans, English, or Russians. Therefore, it is exactly this approach that condemns us to inferiority."

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Poland / USA

"A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises."