Tag Archives: Quotes

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 17th-20th May

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  • Dorothy Richardson was born on 5/17/1873. “If there was a trick, there must be a trickster.”
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne died on 5/19/1864. “The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.” Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 133: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen

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  • Title: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen
  • Compiled by: Dominique Enright
  • Year Published: 2002/This Edition: 2005 (Barnes & Noble Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2005
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: I own nearly two dozen Jane Austen-related books, so it comes as something of a surprise that this is the first one being featured in my P366. I’m not sure how I managed to overlook them for so long but, fear not! They will get their full, fair due in future. I think that this nifty compilation volume is a natural starting point: the great writer is presented at her wittiest and liveliest, with excerpts taken from both her novels and personal correspondence with her sister Cassandra. It’s a truthful approach, as we are not spared the waspishness or vanity of the private woman or, far worse, forced to endure the sugar-coated spinster trope prevalent in so many biographies. Set beside snippets from her fiction, we are given a double-barrel blast of the “real” Jane (so far as such a thing can be accomplished): a powerful, candid wielder of arrow-sharp words and wit, a master of language perfectly controlled and aimed.
  • Motivation: Acerbic, perceptive and highly literate, Jane Austen is one of my favourite muses and guiding lights. Shocking, I’m sure.
  • Times Read: A few
  • Random Excerpt/Page 110: “I do not like the Miss Blackstones; indeed, I was always determined not to like them, so there is the less merit in it.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Jane Austen, Watercolour and pencil portrait b...

    Jane Austen, Watercolour and pencil portrait by her sister Cassandra, 1810 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 12th-15th May

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  • Amy Lowell died on 5/12/1925. “Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.”
  • Daphne du Maurier was born on 5/13/1907. “Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid, too real.” (from Rebecca)
  • Jean Rhys died on 5/14/1979. “Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
  • L. Frank Baum was born on 5/15/1856. “Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.”
  • Emily Dickinson died on 5/15/1886. “Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.”
  • Katherine Anne Porter was born on 5/15/1890. Her The Collected Stories won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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[All images are in the public domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

 

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 5th-9th May

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  • Christopher Morley was born on 5/5/1890. “Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.”
  • Henry David Thoreau died on 5/6/1862. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
  • L. Frank Baum died on 5/6/1919. “I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.”
  • Robert Browning was born on 5/7/1812. “A minute’s success pays the failure of years.”
  • Gustave Flaubert died on 5/8/1880. “A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.”
  • Edmund Wilson was born on 5/8/1895. “I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.”

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The Dead Writers Round-Up: 2nd-4th May

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  • Van Wyck Brooks died on 5/2/1963.
Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks, 1909

Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks, 1909

“If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?”

 

  • May Sarton was born on 5/3/1912. “In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.”
  • William Inge was born on 5/3/1913. He wrote several wildly popular plays that were successfully adapted for the screen: Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop. He won the Academy Award for writing the original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass.
  • Jane Bowles died on 5/4/1973. “I am a writer and I want to write.”

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 27th April

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  • Ralph Waldo Emerson died on 4/27/1882.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

  • Hart Crane died on 4/27/1932.  “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”