Tag Archives: Quotes

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)

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]

Daily Diversion #73: Long I Stood There*

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Mansion Original

Mansion Original

When I snapped this  image in October, I wasn’t too impressed with the result. It didn’t spark my imagination, which is always a bad sign. I was in a hurry and used my camera phone, which was zoomed in a bit too much. Even though this house has stories to tell, I didn’t feel any of them that day. My creativity felt closed off. Since I’m a writer, and not a photographer, it’s normal if I am not immediately able to capture a visual; I tuck everything away until the time is right. I’m familiar enough with this house, which is in my home city, to know that the intuitive call to my creative process would happen, eventually and beautifully.

After a conversation with Jennifer from Quirk’n It, I decided to wade through the 1300+ photos on my phone. When I saw this one, it struck me differently than it did two months ago. I was playing around with some effects, when it hit me: for the last few months, I’ve been writing a short story featuring this house in triplicate. The house is not the star, nor was it the impetus for the piece, but it’s there just the same: altered, transformed, re-imagined into something else. All before I took the photograph. Remembered from previous glimpses, from some unremembered or unnoticed tucking away.

 

Mansion Original Version
Mansion-Altered Version # 1: Because my story is a bit eerie, I chose effects that dimmed the mansion’s bright, well-kept beauty.
Mansion-Altered Version #2: It’s beginning to look as if scary things could happen here.
Mansion-Altered Version #3: Or, perhaps they already did.
Mansion-Altered Version #4-You should probably turn around and leave, before it is too late.
“No one would know if you went pokin’ around the back with your camera. It’s a real boneyard back there, too. Kind of like the insides of a museum was tossed outside and left to rot. There’s beauty in everything, I suppose. Even in neglect.”**

*”Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”-Edgar Allan Poe

**This is an excerpt from my short story, The Brothers’ Boneyard. No stealing, please.

 

 

 

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]