Tag Archives: Inspiration

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]

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 23rd-27th November

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  • Sir Arthur Wing Pinero died on 11/23/1934. “Where there’s tea there’s hope.” (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; The Enchanted Cottage; The Amazons)
  • Andre Malraux died on 11/23/1976. “Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.” (Man’s Fate)
  • Roald Dahl died on 11/23/1990. “Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.” (James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Matilda; The Witches; Fantastic Mr. Fox) Continue reading →

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 21st-22nd November

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  • Voltaire was born on 11/21/1694. “I hate women because they always know where things are.” (Candide)
  • Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was born on 11/21/1863. “We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another’s success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.” (Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900; On the Art of Reading)
  • Harold Nicolson was born on 11/21/1886. “We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.” (Paul Verlaine; Swinburne; King George V; The Age of Reason (1700-1789); Byron: The Last Journey)
  • Ellen Glasgow died on 11/21/1945. “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” (Virginia; In This Our Life)
  • Robert Benchley died on 11/21/1945. “Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.” (Pluck and Luck; Inside Benchley; Benchley Beside Himself)
  • George Eliot was born on 11/22/1819. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” (Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda)
  • Andre Gide was born on 11/22/1869. “There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.” (The Fruits of the Earth; The Immoralist)
  • Jack London died on 11/22/1916. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” (The Call of the Wild; The Sea-Wolf; White Fang; The Iron Heel; The People of the Abyss)
  • Aldous Huxley died on 11/22/1963. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” (Crome Yellow; Brave New World)
  • C.S. Lewis died on 11/22/1963. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” (Mere Christianity; The Screwtape Letters; The Chronicles of Narnia)
Voltaire
Robert Benchley
George Eliot
Andre Gide, 1893
Jack London, 1900
Aldous Huxley

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

Inspiration Board: Everything Old is New Again

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What follows is a mad cyclone of some of the oddly delectable bits and bobs setting my head and heart on fire this early November, vintage-style.

Maude Abrantes by Amedeo Modigliani, 1907
US Suffrage Map, 1920
Leatrice Joy
Joe Strummer. Always Joe Strummer.
Kiki de Montparnasse by Gustaw Gwozdecki, 1920
Louise Brooks, 1930
Opel Catalog, 1904
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868
Zelda Fitzgerald, 1922
Mabel Normand, 1917
Cover of The Yellow Book by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894
William Butler Yeats, 1908
Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes in Paris, 1922. Look familiar?
Norma Talmadge on the cover of Photoplay, December 1929
Clyde Fitch’s Greatest Comedy, Girls

 

 

 

Daily Diversion #63: River City, River Song

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The perks to living in a river city are largely ones of aesthetics and mood and philosophy. Ambiance, if you will. Attitude. State of mind. Peace of mind. The advantages aren’t material; they’re bigger than that. More vital. Rivers are wise, yet fierce. Their beauty is quiet and chaotic, changing pace quicker than a hummingbird’s tissue-thin wings. Rivers remind me of nineteenth century English literature, or of the early twentieth century’s John Cowper Powys. Romantic, desolate, abiding. Cosmic. Or, in the words of Herman Hesse: “The river is everywhere.”

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 27th-31st October

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  • Enid Bagnold was born on 10/27/1889. “The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age-what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.”
  • Dylan Thomas was born on 10/27/1914. “When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
  • Sylvia Plath was born on 10/27/1932. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
  • Rex Stout died on 10/27/1975. “I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”
  • Ted Hughes died on 10/28/1998. “Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.”
  • James Boswell was born on 10/29/1740. “A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.”
  • Jean Giraudoux was born on 10/29/1882. “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on 10/30/1751. “The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
  • Ezra Pound was born on 10/30/1885. “A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.”
  • Ella Wheeler Wilcox died on 10/30/1919. “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.”
  • Rose Macaulay died on 10/30/1958. “Love’s a disease. But curable.”
  • John Evelyn died on 10/31/1620. “Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world.”
  • John Keats was born on 10/31/1795. “A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.”
  • Natalie Clifford Barney was born on 10/31/1876. “Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.”

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

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 21st-25th October

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  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 10/21/1772. “Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
  • Jack Kerouac died on 10/21/1969. “My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”
  • Kingsley Amis died on 10/22/1995. “If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” (Lucky Jim)
  • Sarah Josepha Hale was born on 10/24/1788. “There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.”
  • Denise Levertov was born on 10/24/1923. “Images/split the truth/in fractions.”
  • Geoffrey Chaucer died on 10/25/1400. “There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.”
  • Frank Norris died on 10/25/1902. “The function of the novelist…is to comment upon life as he sees it.”
  • John Berryman was born on 10/25/1914. “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
  • Mary McCarthy died on 10/25/1989. “We are the hero of our own story.”

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