"The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host"

“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”
from “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” by Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25 1925 – August 3 1964

A rushing together . . . Of the raisins of wrath

To summarize the past by theft and allusion
With a parasong a palimpsest
A manuscreed writ over
A graph of consciousness at best
A consciousness of felt life
A rushing together
Of the raisins of wrath
Of living and dying
The laughter and forgetting
The maze and amaze of life.

from Americus Book I, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born March 24, 1919, Yonkers

"If this be treason, then make the most of it."

"There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free ... we must fight! ... Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! ... Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

Patrick Henry, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, March 23, 1775

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

from "Nostalgia" by Billy Collins, born March 22, 1941

Jack Kerouac - born March 12, 1922, Lenox, Massachusetts

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles."
. . . from On the Road

"It was a lovely village where no one was over 30 years of age, and no one died."

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

- from Cien Años de Soledad, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born on March 6, 1928

"Everyone calls 'barbarity' that to which he is not accustomed."

"Chacun appelle 'barbarie' ce qui n'est pas de son usage."

"When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me, rather than I with her?"

- from "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" by Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 - September 13, 1592)