Meandering forever . . .

Today is the birthday of Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (born September 30, 1928), writer, professor, and political activist. He is the author of 57 books, the best known of which is Night and is the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

"When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude." - Elie Wiesel

"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world." - Elie Wiesel

"What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically." - Elie Wiesel


"Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil." - Elie Wiesel

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Here I go meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (September 29, 1864 – December 31, 1936) was an essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.

An important concept for Miguel de Unamuno was intrahistoria - he thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts.

He is oft referred to as a predecessor of Existentialist philosophy with Søren Kierkegaard.

"A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about." - Miguel de Unamuno

"It is sad not to be loved, but it is much sadder not to be able to love." - Miguel de Unamuno

"Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them." - Miguel de Unamuno

"To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be." - Miguel de Unamuno

"The devil is an angel too." - Miguel de Unamuno

Trivia bit: Miguel de Unamuno mastered 14 languages. In order to read Søren Kierkegaard in the original language he learned Danish.

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Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Edith Mary Pargeter (September 28, 1913 – October 14, 1995), author. She was a prolific writer and wrote under a number of pseudonyms.

Edith Mary Pargeter is probably best known under the name Ellis Peters, the pen name she used to write the highly popular series of Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries.

"Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light." - Ellis Peters

"Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it." - Ellis Peters

"Truth can be costly, but in the end it never falls short of value for the price paid." - Ellis Peters

"There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil." - Ellis Peters

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Henri Frédéric Amiel (September 27, 1821 – May 11, 1881), philosopher, poet and critic. He is best known by the one book published after his death, the Journal Intime, which is considered a masterpiece of self-analysis.

"The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides." - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"The highest function of the teacher consists not so much in imparting knowledge as in stimulating the pupil in its love and pursuit. To know how to suggest is the art of teaching." - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you." - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence." - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"All appears to change when we change." - Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Thomas Stearns Eliot, (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), poet, playwright, and literary critic. He is best known as T. S. Eliot and for his poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Wasteland (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925).

T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

"I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates." - T. S. Eliot

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliot

"Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow."

- T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Trivia bit: T. S. Eliot was a very private man and made a provision in his will that forbade an official biography.

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Meandering on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962), author. He was the recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature and is oft referred to as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature. Absalom, Absalom!, is considered William Faulkner's masterpiece.

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things." - William Faulkner

"Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie." - William Faulkner

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands." - William Faulkner


"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." - William Faulkner

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), author. He is best known as F. Scott Fitzgerald and for his novel, The Great Gatsby which chronicles an era that he dubbed the Jazz Age. He is oft referred to as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You can stroke people with words. "- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Meandering in twilight . . .

Today is the birthday of John William "Trane" Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967), jazz saxophonist and composer.

"All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws." - John Coltrane

"Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe. . . That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music."- John Coltrane

"Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad." - John Coltrane


"There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror." - John Coltrane


"I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light." - John Coltrane

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Meandering in theory . . .

Today is the birthday of Michael Faraday (September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867), chemist and physicist. He is oft referred to as the greatest experimental scientist in history, best known for his study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

"The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication." - Michael Faraday

"There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle." - Michael Faraday

"The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly." - Michael Faraday

"Regarding the hereafter, "Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties." - Michael Faraday

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Meandering in time . . .

Today is the birthday of Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 – 13 August 13, 1946), author. He is best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

"A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it." - H. G. Wells

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn." - H. G. Wells

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative." - H. G. Wells

"An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic." - H. G. Wells

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today." - H. G. Wells

"The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow." - H. G. Wells

"If we don't end war, war will end us." - H. G. Wells

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Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of Upton Beall Sinclair (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), author. He is best known for his book, The Jungle (1906), which launched a government investigation of the meatpacking plants of Chicago and changed the food laws of the United States of America.

Upton Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his novel Dragon's Teeth (1942).

"An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain." - Upton Sinclair

"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda." - Upton Sinclair

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

"The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery." - Upton Sinclair

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Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of William Gerald Golding (September 19, 1911 – June 19, 1993), author and poet. He is best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies.

William Golding received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.

"We need more humanity, more care, more love. There are those who expect a political system to produce that; and others who expect the love to produce the system. My own faith is that the truth of the future lies between the two and we shall behave humanly and a bit humanely, stumbling along, haphazardly generous and gallant, foolishly and meanly wise until the rape of our planet is seen to be the preposterous folly that it is." - William Golding

"Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things." - William Golding

"It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable." - William Golding

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Meandering in place . . .

Today is the birthday of William March (born "William Edward Campbell" 18 September 1893 - 15 May 1954), soldier and author. He is best known for his novels The Bad Seed and Company K.

"The time comes in the life of each of us when we realize that death awaits us as it awaits others, that we will receive at the end neither preference nor exemption. It is then, in that disturbed moment, that we know life is an adventure with an ending, not a succession of bright days that go on forever. Sometimes the knowledge come with the repudiation and quick revolt that such injustice awaits us, sometimes with fear that dries the mouth and closes the eyes for an instant, sometimes with servile weariness, an acquiescence more dreadful than fear. The knowledge that my own end was near came with pain, and afterwards astonishment, with the conventional heart attack, from which, I've been told, I've made an excellent recovery." -William March
(Entitled Poor Pilgrim, Poor Stranger, found in his typewriter the morning of his death)

"You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching , across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there." - William March

"Everybody must seem crazy if you see deep enough into their minds." - William March

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Here we go meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001), author. He is best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). At Stanford University in 1959, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people.

"We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past." - Ken Kesey

"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." - Ken Kesey

"Nothing lasts." - Ken Kesey

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Laurence Johnston Peter (September 16, 1919 - January 12, 1990), author and educator. He is best known for his book The Peter Principle, Why Things Always Go Wrong.

"The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time." - Laurence J. Peter

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." - Laurence J. Peter

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?" - Laurence J. Peter

"Speak when you are angry - and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." - Laurence J. Peter

"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else." - Laurence J. Peter

"Lead, follow, or get out of the way." - Laurence J. Peter

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Meandering on and on . . .

Today is the birthday of François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, prince de Marcillac (September 15, 1613 – March 17, 1680), author. He is oft referred to as the greatest maxim writer of France and one of her best memoir writers.

"Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear." - La Rochefoucauld

"Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones." - La Rochefoucauld

"The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others." - La Rochefoucauld

"We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us." - La Rochefoucauld

"To succeed in the world we do everything we can to appear successful already." - La Rochefoucauld

"Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise." - La Rochefoucauld

"We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others." - La Rochefoucauld

"There is great skill in knowing how to conceal one's skill." - La Rochefoucauld

"How can we expect others to keep our secrets if we cannot keep them ourselves?" - La Rochefoucauld

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Meandering above and below . . .

Today is the birthday of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (September 14, 1486 – February 18, 1535), physician, soldier, theologian and an adept in alchemy, astrology, and magic.

"Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other." - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

"I confess that Magic teacheth many superfluous things, and curious prodigies for ostentation; leave them as empty things, yet be not ignorant of their causes. But those things which are for the profit of men -- for the turning away of evil events, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honor, or fortune -- may be done without offense to God or injury to religion, because they are, as profitable, so necessary." - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

"Every Alchymist is a Physician or a Sope-boyler." - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

"Nothing is concealed from the wise and sensible, while the unbelieving and unworthy cannot learn the secrets" - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

"All things which are similar and therefore connected, are drawn to each other's power." - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941), writer.

"That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful." - Sherwood Anderson

"Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?" - Sherwood Anderson

"If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?" - Sherwood Anderson

"The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men." - Sherwood Anderson

"I Want to Know Why." - Sherwood Anderson

Trivia bit: Sherwood Anderson died after he accidentally swallowed a piece of a toothpick embedded in a martini olive at a party in Panama. The official cause of death was peritonitis. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure.

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Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), writer. He is best known for writing The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States of America and as the Sage of Baltimore. During his lifetime H. L. Mencken was considered one of the most influential writers in America.

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos." - H. L. Mencken

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood." - H. L. Mencken

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking." - H. L. Mencken

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H. L. Mencken

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." - H. L. Mencken

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of David Herbert Richards Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 2, 1930), author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic - a writer. He is best known as D. H. Lawrence, author of the novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Over the years, the book has been banned in several countries, including the USA, and has been subjected to several obscenity trials resulting in the easing of censorship in those countries.

"You don't want to love--your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere." - D. H. Lawrence

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams." - D. H. Lawrence

"We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known." - D. H. Lawrence

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul." - D. H. Lawrence

"But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions." - D. H. Lawrence

"When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere." - D. H. Lawrence

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Meandering in circles . . .

Today is the birthday of Charles Sanders Peirce (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914), logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist. He is oft referred to as a polymath and with his pragmatic maxim, a founding father of Pragmatism.

"It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher." - Charles S. Pierce

"It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system." - Charles S. Pierce

"The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty." - Charles S. Pierce

"The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea." - Charles S. Pierce

"The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs." - Charles S. Pierce

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Meandering here and there . . .

Today is the birthday of Cesare Pavese (September 9, 1908 – August 27, 1950), poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.

"We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten." - Cesare Pavese

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears." - Cesare Pavese

"One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better." - Cesare Pavese

"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped." - Cesare Pavese

"The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies." - Cesare Pavese

"He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity." - Cesare Pavese

"Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue." - Cesare Pavese

"The only joy in the world is to begin." - Cesare Pavese

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Meandering on . . .

Today is the birthday of Cincinnatus Heine (or Hiner) Miller (September 8, 1837 - February 17, 1913), writer, best known by his pen name Joaquin Miller. He is oft referred to as the Poet of the Sierras and the Byron of the Rockies.

"Brave admiral, say but one good word: What shall we do when hope is gone?" The words leapt like a leaping sword: "Sail on! sail on! and on!" - Joaquin Miller

"In men whom men condemn as ill I find so much of goodness still, In men whom men pronounce divine I find so much of sin and blot I do not dare to draw a line Between the two, where God has not." - Joaquin Miller

"That man who lives for self alone, Lives for the meanest mortal known." - Joaquin Miller

"The biggest dog has been a pup." - Joaquin Miller

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Meandering in thought . . .

Today is the birthday of Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 - April 10, 1945), author and historian. He is best known for his works, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932) and Everyman His Own Historian (1935).

"The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it." - Carl Lotus Becker

"Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept." - Carl Lotus Becker

"All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any." - Carl Lotus Becker

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Meandering we go . . .

Today is the birthday of Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928), writer and philosopher. He is best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974). The book originally rejected by 121 publishers, has been described by the press as "the most widely read philosophy book" and has sold more than 5 million copies in twenty-seven languages.

"We're in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone." - Robert M. Pirsig

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." - Robert M. Pirsig

"The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." - Robert M. Pirsig

"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands." - Robert M. Pirsig

"We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives." - Robert M. Pirsig

"Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality." - Robert M. Pirsig

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Meandering . . .

Today is the birthday of Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905 - March 1, 1983), writer of essays, novels and autobiographies. He is best known for Darkness at Noon and The Thirteen Tribe.

"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion." - Arthur Koestler

"Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet." - Arthur Koestler

"Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." - Arthur Koestler

"True creativity often starts where language ends." - Arthur Koestler

"Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears." - Arthur Koestler

"Scientists are peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity." - Arthur Koestler

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Meandering around . . .

Today is the birthday of Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960), author. He is best known for his first novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography Black Boy (1945).

"Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread." - Richard Wright

"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all." - Richard Wright

"Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality." - Richard Wright

"It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books..." - Richard Wright

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Meandering in theory . . .

Today is the birthday of Carl David Anderson (September 3, 1905 – January 11, 1991), physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932 and of the muon in 1936.

Carl David Anderson opened up the entire field of particle physics, (the study of the atom - the smallest unit of matter) and because of his discoveries, he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence — and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark." - Carl David Anderson

"The ideal student would be one who was not working for grades but was working because he was interested in the work and not trying to compete with fellow students." - Carl David Anderson

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Meandering about . . .

Today is the birthday of Cleveland Amory (September 2, 1917 – October 14, 1998), author. He devoted his life to promoting animal rights and is best known for writing about Polar Bear, his pet cat.

"Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression." - Cleveland Amory

"A good family, it seems, is one that used to be better." - Cleveland Amory

"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind." - Cleveland Amory

"The facts of life are very stubborn things." - Cleveland Amory

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Meandering in the stacks . . .

Today is the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950), author. He is best known for his creation Tarzan.

"If I had followed my better judgment always, my life would have been a very dull one." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

"In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

"I write to escape ... to escape poverty." - Edgar Rice Burroughs

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