Tag Archives: quotes
3 Days 3 Quotes Challenge – Day 1
Erika Kind
Thanks to author Erika Kind from Liechtenstein, I’ve accepted her invitation to the 3 Day 3 Quotes Challenge. Here’s my quote for Day 1 followed by the challenge information for nominees to participate.
“We had the experience but missed the meaning.” by John Steinbeck
I discovered this quote in Anne Ayers Koch’s book, Look Both Ways At the Intersection of Yesterday and tomorrow.
http://www.amazon.com/Look-Both-Ways-Intersection-Yesterday/dp/1937303292/
The rules for the 3 Days 3 Quotes Challenge:
- Thank the blogger, who nominated you.
- Post one of your favorite quotes (different quote on each day) on three consecutive days. The quote can be from your favorite book, author, or your own. Don’t forget to acknowledge the source.
- Nominate three bloggers to challenge them using their blog links.
My nominees:
Filed under Blogger Challenges
John Keats, English Romatic Poet
“I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a poem, and to be given away by a novel.”
“I wish to believe in immortality — I wish to live with you forever.”
“There is a budding tomorrow in midnight.”
“The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy.”
“The poetry of the Earth is never dead.”
John Keats was the eldest of five children born to a lower-middle class family in London. When his father fell off a horse and died, he left a large inheritance which John didn’t receive. His mother remarried, but the five children were sent to live with her parents. She joined them when the marriage failed. She died in 1810 and her parents died in 1814. Keats and his siblings didn’t receive their inheritance due to a dishonest guardian. John apprenticed with a surgeon in 1811 until 1814. While working in a London hospital as a junior apothecary and surgeon in charge of dressing wounds, he met Leigh Hunt, a poet and author and became friends with Percy Bysshe Shelley. They encouraged him to write poetry and he was 18 when he wrote his first poem. His first book, Poems, appeared in 1817.
The next year, his health began to fail, his financial difficulties got worse, his brother Tom battled tuberculosis, and the other brother was left penniless from a poor investment. John’s fiancee, Fanny Brawne, brought him happiness in spite of all the family troubles. In 1819, John wrote brilliant work, including, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”
In 1820, John’s tuberculosis became worse. He moved to Italy for the warm climate to ease his condition but he died there in February 1821 at 25 years old. An English Romantic poet left us too soon. (Information from http://www.history.com.)
Filed under Poets
Quotes and Words
“The boundaries of our world shift under out feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order.” Rollo May
“I write to find out what I’m talking about.” Edward Albee
“I let my characters do the talking, simple as that.” Terry McMillian
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” Margaret Atwood
Filed under Quotes
Novel Writing Quotes
Gene Wolfe said, “You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”
“The protagonist is the character whose fate matters most to the story.” Stephen Koch
Filed under writing
Quotes by Writer Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch, an Irish-born British author and philosopher, was born July 15, 1919 and died February 8, 1999 at age 79. She ranked twelfth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” She wrote 26 novels and followed the tradition of novelists like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George Elliot, and Proust. Murdoch was married for 40 years to John Bayley who wrote two memoirs about his life with Murdoch. Shortly before her death, he wrote Iris: A Memoir. After her death, he wrote a sequel called Iris and Her Friends. His memories of Murdoch as she developed Alzheimer’s disease was made into a film with Kate Winslet portraying Murdoch.
I haven’t read anything by Murdoch, have you?
Quotes by Dame Helen Lydia Mirren
Born in London on July 26, 1945, Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth II among other awards for her portrayal of the Queen on TV and in Movies. She wrote an autobiography called In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures published in 2007.
Mirren was listed as one of the fifty best-dressed over 50s by the Guardian in March 2013.
During her career, she has portrayed three British queens in different films and television series.
On June 14, 2003, Mirren received a Damehood in the Order of the British Empire for Services to the Performing Arts.
Information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Mirren
Filed under Quotes
Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell Published June 6, 1949
George Orwell is the pen name used by Eric Arthur Blair who was born on June 25, 1903 in British India. Orwell suffered from tuberculosis that was diagnosed in December of 1947 until he died in January, 1950. He believed that vague writing was a powerful tool of political manipulation and it could shape the way people think. In his essay Politics and the English Language (1946) he wrote six rules for writers:
- Never use a metaphor or simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Andrew N. Rubin argues, “Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very language that we use.”[119) (Information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell)
Filed under Authors
William Shakespeare Died 399 Years Ago Today
William Shakespeare’s birth date is unknown, but his baptism was on April 26, 1564. He was 53 when he died on April 23, 1616. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582. She was 26/27 years old and he was 18. She died 7 years after Shakespeare’s death.
They had three children, Susanna in August 1583 and twins, Hamnet and Judith Quiney in 1585. Hamnet died at 11 years old during the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.
I’d like to go to a Shakespeare play this week.
Which one is your favorite?
Filed under Famous people, Quotes
Writing Quote by Brooke Warner
I often tell writers I work with, “Your book already knows what it wants to be,” and I believe that our calling to write the book we’re supposed to write is a whisper–something between intuition and following your inner calling. We receive these whispers all the time. Some of us ignore them or are so practiced at tuning them out that we can no longer hear them . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re not there!
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Julaina Kleist-Corwin 