Why are we here? What's life all about? | LitBash 39

"Why are we here? What's life all about?" Find out the truth... in tales "that never have been and never will be." Start with writers who were...

Born this week:

Stanisław Lem, Poland
"Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way."

Elsa Triolet, France

Ursula Hontsch, Germany

Sherwood Anderson, USA
"I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

Roald Dahl, UK
"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you."

Manuel Tamayo y Baus, Spain

Agatha Christie, UK
"Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions."

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Argentina
"Life is a game of chess and you never really know when you are winning or losing."

Masaoka Shiki, Japan
"I had thought that satori is to die without fear anytime. But it is a wrong guess. The satori is to live unconcernedly anytime."

Ken Kesey, USA
"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. ... The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

Standish James O'Grady, Ireland

Died this week:

Janis Rainis, Latvia

James Fenimore Cooper, USA
"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

Oriana Fallaci, Italy
"There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape."

Dan Andersson, Sweden

Alfred de Vigny, France
"History is a novel whose author is the people."

Herman Melville, USA
"Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence."

Sean O'Casey, Ireland
"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."