We don't want to be alone

September 23: Actor Mickey Rooney was born Sept. 23, 1920. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest career of any actor ever. He was also married eight times.

"The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married." -- Cyril Connolly.



September 24: Author F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Sep. 24, 1896. He wrote:

"It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

Cioran 101

E. M. Cioran, a Romanian writer who wrote in French, died on this day in 1995. A sampling of Cioran:

"When we must make a crucial decision, it is extremely dangerous to consult anyone else, since no one sincerely wishes us well."

"Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor."

"To love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?"

"Happiness and misery make me equally wretched."

"Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else."

"Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, what he dreads most is being survived by his friends."

Cioran was born in Transylvania. he said that gypsy music made him "mad with melancholy." His father was a gloomy priest. His mother's last note to him ended:

"Whatever people try to do, they'll regret it sooner or later."

For more by Cioran on death and thoughts of death, visit Farewells

Rossetti, stoned again

Italian painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

The hour when you learn that all is vain
And that Hope sows what Love shall never reap.

Happy Valentine's Day

"To be in love is to be in a state of perpetual anaesthesia." -- H. L. Mencken.