"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Monday, January 26, 2015

51 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature



For original editorial credits and source link go to BuzzFeed's link crediting its readers


1.
“At the still point, there the dance is.” 
- T. S. Eliot

2.
“In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.”
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

3.
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there
leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
- J. D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

4.
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar




6.
“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
- Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

7.
“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

8.
“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice




10.
“‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’”
- Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

11.
“The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

12.
“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down,
but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities




14.
“As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts
and the Two Thoughts he thought were these:
a) Anything can happen to anyone, and
b) It is best to be prepared.”
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

15.
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.”
W. H. Auden, The More Loving One

16.
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden




18.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

19.
“America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
- Allen Ginsburg, America

20.
“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat,
but it was a defeat better than many victories.
- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage




22.
“At the still point, there the dance is.”
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

23.
“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question
he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

24.
“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
- Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank




26.
“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
- Toni Morrison, Beloved

27.
“How wild it was, to let it be.”
- Cheryl Strayed, Wild

28.
“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
- T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock




30.
“She was lost in her longing to understand.”
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

31.
“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which
we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening

32.
“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us,
with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke,
and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”




34.
“The half life of love is forever.”
- Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

35.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

36.
“There are darknesses in life and there are lights,
and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
- Bram Stroker, Dracula




37.
“Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet.”
- L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

38.
“I could hear the human noise we sat there making,
not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

39.
“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
- Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre




41.
“I have spread my dreams under your feet; 
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
- W. B. Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

42.
“It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”
- Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

43.
“For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly.”
- Langston Hughes, The Big Sea




45.
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded;
not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things,
packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

46.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

47.
“Journeys end in lovers meeting.”
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night




49.
“It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live. Remember that.”
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

50.
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

51.
“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them,
for words have the power to change us.”
- Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices



Wednesday, January 14, 2015

R.E. Slater - An Old Friend (a poem)





An Old Friend
by R.E. Slater


I sat behind my writing desk
as an old friend would
to discuss the day’s events,
ideas, or people I've met,
 or odd assortment of complaints,
in whichever mood of tiredness,
happiness, torment,
or humor I bore
to its warm wooden surface
so thoughtful and reflective
of my many tempers
blessed or disturbed.

Daily it seems we converse
of this or that,
or that and this,
brooding upon the many items
that had befallen my wandering path
through the courses of the day
so that after a little while,
when tempers are tucked away,
and distilling moods inlaid in script,
I wearily leave its good-natured ear
to re-enter a madding world
deaf to my abandonment.

More reassured of my purposes,
having settled mine own responses
made surer in my heart
when none other had provided
the listening comfort
my weary soul sorely needed
during that hour of the day
when feeling overwhelmed
to life's desperate inquisitions
so harsh and unfeeling
to a hopeful heart wishing
only peace and contentedness.


- R.E. Slater
January 14, 2015
rev Jan. 29, 2015

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved