17/04/2011

Love, Life, and Pain: LitBash 18



"One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books." Graham Greene.

Use this week as an opportunity to learn about life, love, and pain. Read books by authors who were born or died the following week.

Born this week:

Charlotte Bronte, UK
"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life."

Anne de Stael-Holstein, France
"We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us."

William Shakespeare, UK
"Crabbed age and youth cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care"

Vladimir Nabokov, Russia
"What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?"

Halldor Laxness, Iceland
"while there's a breath left in my nostrils, it will never keep me down, no matter how hard it blows."

Maurice Druon, France
"Number is the Word but is not utterance; it is wave and light, though no one sees it; it is rhytm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each for of life is a particular reverberation of Number."

Margit Sandemo, Norway


Anthony Trollope, UK
"No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself."

Died this week:

Daphne du Maurier, UK
"All autobiography is self-indulgent."

James Ballard, UK

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring."

Bram Stoker, UK
"I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome"

Jean Baptiste Racine, France
"My only hope lies in my despair."

Mark Twain, USA
"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain
"You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne."

Pamela Lyndon Travers, UK
"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns."

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canada

Alejo Carpentier, Cuba
Travel, Music and Writing… my dream.

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