Tag Archives: Books

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 7th-10th December

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  • Cicero died on 12/7/43 BC. “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” (On the Laws; Brutus; On Duties)
  • Willa Cather was born on 12/7/1873. “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” (O Pioneers!; My Antonia; The Song of the Lark; One of Ours)
  • Thornton Wilder died on 12/7/1975. “An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.” (The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Our Town; The Skin of Our Teeth; The Matchmaker)
  • Robert Graves died on 12/7/1985. “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” (Good-bye to All That; The White Goddess; I, Claudius; The Greek Myths)
  • Thomas De Quincey died on 12/8/1859. “The public is a bad guesser.” (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
  • James Thurber was born on 12/8/1894. “Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.” (The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities; My Life and Hard Times; My World and Welcome to It; The Male Animal (with Elliot Nugent); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
  • John Milton was born on 12/9/1608. “A Mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell , a Hell of Heaven.” (Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained)
  • Dame Edith Sitwell died on 12/9/1964. “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” (Clowns’ Houses; Alexander Pope; I Live Under a Black Sun)
  • Emily Dickinson was born on 12/10/1830. “I’m nobody, who are you?”
  • Luigi Pirandello died on 12/10/1936. “Drama is action, sir, drama and not confounded philosophy.” (Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Rules of the Game)
  • Damon Runyon died on 12/10/1946. “I came to the conclusion long ago that all life is six to five against.” (Guys and Dolls; The Damon Runyon Omnibus)
  • Mark Van Doren died on 12/10/1972. “Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.” (Spring Thunder; Winter Diary; Collected Poems 1922-1938; The Transients)

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Daily Diversion #74: Beat Cat

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She's a calico with excellent taste.

She’s a calico with excellent taste.

Zizi Jeanmaire digs The Beats, too. After much deep feline reflection she marked out, with a lazy lick to the page, the following passage as her favourite: “My roshi said when the word comes out in a flash it’s not a word, it’s your true mental state; when you search for the right word, it will never be the right word.” (Gary Snyder to Allen Ginsberg, 4 September 1961)

NMNPHX December Spotlight Awards Recipient

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Nicole of  NMNPHX has selected A Small Press Life as one of the recipients of her Spotlight Awards, for the month of December. Every month, she aims her beam at just 3-5 blogs. We are truly excited and humbled to receive such a nice shout-out. If you’ve never visited her blog, you should check it out now!

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 1st-6th December

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  • Rex Stout was born on 12/1/1886. “There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.” (Nero Wolfe series)
  • James Baldwin died on 12/1/1987. “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” (Go Tell it on the Mountain; Giovanni’s Room)
  • Robertson Davies died on 12/2/1995. “Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.” (The Deptford Trilogy)
  • Joseph Conrad was born on 12/3/1857. “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.” (Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim)
  • Robert Louis Stevenson died on 12/3/1894. “I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.” (Treasure Island; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Kidnapped; The Master of Ballantrae)
  • John Gay died on 12/4/1732. “On the choice of friends, Our good or evil name depends.” (The Beggar’s Opera; Three Hours After Marriage)
  • Thomas Carlyle was born on 12/4/1795. “No pressure, no diamonds.” (Sartor Resartus; The French Revolution: A History)
  • Samuel Butler was born on 12/4/1835. “It is tact that is golden, not silence.” (Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh)
  • Rainer Maria Rilke was born on 12/4/1875. “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” (Sonnets to Orpheus; Letters to a Young Poet)
  • Christina Rossetti was born on 12/5/1830. “Silence is more musical than any song.” (Goblin Market; In the Bleak Midwinter)
  • Alexandre Dumas Pere died on 12/5/1870. “One’s work may be finished some day, but one’s education never.” (The Count of Monte Cristo; The Three Musketeers)
  • Anthony Trollope died on 12/6/1882. “I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.” (Chronicles of Barsetshire)
  • Sir Osbert Sitwell was born on 12/6/1892. “It is music to my ears. I have always said that if I were a rich man, I would employ a professional praiser.” (Triple Fugue; Before the Bombardment; Left Hand, Right Hand)

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 29th-30th November

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  • Louisa May Alcott was born on 11/29/1832. “It takes two flints to make a fire.” (Little Women; Little Men; Jo’s Boys)
  • C.S. Lewis was born on 11/29/1898. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” (Beyond Personality; Studies in Words; The Chronicles of Narnia)
  • Madeleine L’Engle was born on 11/29/1918. “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” (A Wrinkle in Time; A Swiftly Tilting Planet)
  • Jonathan Swift was born on 11/30/1667. “May you live all the days of your life.” (Gulliver’s Travels; A Journal to Stella)
  • Mark Twain was born on 11/30/1835. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Prince and the Pauper; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)
  • Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on 11/30/1874. “There are so many unpleasant things in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.” (Anne of Green Gables; Anne of Avonlea)
  • Oscar Wilde died on 11/30/1900. “A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray; Lady Windermere’s Fan; The Ballad of Reading Gaol)
  • Sir Compton Mackenzie died on 11/30/1972. “The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal.” (Whisky Galore; The Monarch of the Glen)
Louisa May Alcott
Jonathan Swift
Mark Twain
Lucy Maud Montgomery, circa 1920-1930
Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony

[All photographs are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]