25 September 1897: American novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner, considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, was born this day in Mississippi and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.
25 September 1513: Pacific Ocean sighted by Balboa
25 September 1777: Philadelphia, then the American capital, was occupied by British forces during the American Revolution.
25 September 1799: André Masséna, French nobleman and general under Napoleon, defeated Russian forces in the Second Battle of Zürich.
25 September 1789: The first Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. The first ten became the Bill of Rights.
25 September 1890: Wilford Woodruff, president of the Mormon church, renounced the practice of polygamy. This paved the way for Utah’s acceptance as a state in 1896.
25 September 1962: Sonny Liston became world heavyweight boxing champion with a first-round knockout of Floyd Patterson in Chicago.
25 September 1981: Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O’Connor
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
- William Hazlitt
When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
- Oscar Wilde
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner
To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel - it’s to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.
- Fernando Pessoa
