Three authors were born on this date. All three are listed on my Unfinished List of the 100 Best Fiction Books of All Time. All three wrote for children as well as adults. Can you identify the author for each of the following quotations?

1. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

2. “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

3. “The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike…Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.”

4. “. . . it comes to me that if I am not free to accept guilt when I do wrong, then I am not free at all. If all my mistakes are excused, if there’s an alibi, a rationalization for every blunder, then I am not free at all. I have become subhuman.”

5. “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

6. “God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.”

7. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

8. “Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!”

9. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere–‘Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,’ as Herbert says, ‘fine nets and stratagems.’ God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

10. “Poor dull Concord. Nothing colorful has come through here since the Redcoats.”

Happy Birthday to Jack, Jo, and Maddy, three of my favorite authors and thinkers.