Two quotations from an avant-garde and popular American poet, e.e.cummings, who is remembered as the predominant voice of twentieth century poetry.
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
“I imagine that yes is the only living thing.”
- e.e.cummings (1894-1962)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the Renaissance and has been credited as the originator or the essay. Despite his rigorous education, Montaigne is also known for the famous saying, “What do I know?”
"We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed.”
- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Coming from a long line of clerics, Samuel Butler was expected to become a minister. He chose to leave the church after a crisis of faith and emigrated to New Zealand, where he wrote books and farmed sheep.
“From a worldly point of view there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.”
- Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
An author, naturalist, and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was perhaps best known for writing ‘Walden’, a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings.
“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Married to aviator Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was an acclaimed author.
“What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice.”
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Often associated with existentialism, Albert Camus was a French author and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.”
- Albert Camus (1912-1960)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A French poet, novelist and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau was a proponent of Surrealism. His friends and associates include Marcel Proust, Andre’ Gide and Pablo Picasso. He struggled with opium addiction throughout much of his life.
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”
- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jacques Delille, a French poet and translator known for using a great many words to describe a single thing, surprises lovers of brevity through this uncharacteristically ‘to the point’ quotation…
“Fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends.”
- Jacques Delille (1738-1813) (1738 - 1813)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
One of the 20th centuries great moral voices, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), was a philosopher, pacifist, mathematician and writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a prolific American writer, weaving satire and science fiction into essays and novels that contain timeless themes. A POW during World War II, he was one of seven Americans that survived the bombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945. This event inspired one of his most famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five.
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. He is known best for his novels of spiritual dissociation and human awakening.
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
- Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The prolific writer of horror novels saw, as a child, a friend hit by a train, perhaps influencing a lifetime of often profound, macabre writings.
“You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.”
- Stephen King (1947- )
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Emily Dickinson, a deeply eccentric, reclusive soul, became (along with Walt Whitman), one of two quintessentially American poets of the 19th century.
Because I Could Not Stop For Death
“Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality.”
- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Two more quotes from Stephen King, the extremely prolific writer of horror novels, who said of his own writing: “I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac™ and Fries.”
“I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.”
“People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.”
- Stephen King (1947 - )
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In his 1976 novel, The Spectator Bird, this prolific writer, college professor and founder of the creative writing program at Stanford University provides analogies from the visual arts that illuminate the challenges inherent in seeing our own lives, or the lives of others, in any fashion that claims to be objective.
"... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?"
- Wallace Stegner, (1909-1993)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Cyril Connolly was best known as a literary critic. He also wrote and edited, including writing under pen names. In reference to his quotation, which follows, my own hope of course is to have a very large public following and the self be damned, but only if there is some money in it.
“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
- Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Ken Kesey was most known for his 1962 novel, later made into a play, and finally into a movie that won 5 Academy Awards, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He wrote a good deal of nonfiction and staged some very original performance art throughout his life.
“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer - they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
- Ken Kesey (1935-2001)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
While writing his many plays, stories and novels, Shaw supported himself as a journalist, writing for various publications as a book, art and music critic. He lived to age 94 and was a very prolific writer and therefore, as evidenced by this quotation, wasn’t all wrapped up in himself.
“Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.”