16/11/2011

Brighten up the darkest autumn | LitBash 48



Short days? Long evenings? Nothing on TV? A book brightens up the most dreary of days, and helps pass the longest evening. Here are some writers who were...

Born this week:

Hussein Taha, Egypt

Astrid Lindgren, Sweden

"There is very little you can beat into a child, but no limit to what you can hug out of it."

Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany
"Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial world."

Heinz Piontek, Germany

Rene Arcos, France

Henri Bosco, France

Jeannie Ebner, Austria

Klaus Mann, Germany

"Work is the never ending burden without which all other burdens would be unbearable."

Selma Lagerlof, Sweden
"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."

Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

Died this week:

Wilhelm Raabe, Germany
"A man without imagination is like a bird without wings."

Albert Engstrom, Sweden

Marcel Proust, France

"Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people."

Leo Tolstoy, Russia
"Subtleties, allegories, humorous fancies, the wildest generalizations abound, but nothing simple and clear, nothing going straight to the point, that is, to the problem of life.
Besides these graceful frivolities, our literature is full of simple nastiness and brutality, of arguments that would lead men back in the most refined way to primal barbarism, to the principles not only of the pagan, but of the animal life, which we have left behind 5,000 years ago."

Leonardo Sciascia, Italy
"I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it."

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