WIST Quotations

Katsenelenbogen, Eyran -- One Time (book) (2021)

Dave — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:56:50 +0000

They say you only live once, but come to think of it — you only die once as well.

Eyran Katsenelenbogen (b. 1965) Israeli-American jazz pianist [אירן קאצנלנבוגן]
One Time (book) (2021)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1933-03)

Dave — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 20:17:55 +0000

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1933-03)
(Source)

Roosevelt, Eleanor -- You Learn By Living, Introduction (1960)

Dave — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 19:53:29 +0000

Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren’t they? There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. … And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
You Learn By Living, Introduction (1960)

Martin, George R. R. -- A Dance with Dragons [Jojen Reed] (2011)

Dave — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 11:54:52 +0000

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

George R. R. Martin (b. 1948) American author and screenwriter [George Raymond Richard Martin]
A Dance with Dragons [Jojen Reed] (2011)
(Source)

Baldwin, James -- “An interview with James Baldwin” by Studs Terkel (1961), in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)

Dave — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:11:25 +0000

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) American novelist, playwright, activist
“An interview with James Baldwin” by Studs Terkel (1961), in Conversations With James Baldwin (1989)
(Source)

Baldwin revisited this theme multiple times.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.
[Interview with Jane Howard, Life Magazine (24 May 1963)]

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
["James Baldwin Recalls His Childhood," quoting from a television program, New York Times (31 May 1964)]