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Remembering Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson April 4, 1928)  was an American author, poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. Angelou passed away May 28, 2014. Image from Amazon.

See the Google Doodle created to celebrate the 90th anniversary of her birth.

QUOTES

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
 
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

 

Oscar D. Micheaux | Black Filmmaker

OD Michaeux

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was an African American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films. Although the short-lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie company owned and controlled by black filmmakers, Micheaux is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker, a prominent producer of race film, and has been described as “the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century”. He produced both silent films and sound films when the industry changed to incorporate speaking actors.

 

From Wikipedia and Google

Happy Birthday, Alice Walker!

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker, born in Eatonton, Georgia on February 9, 1944, the eighth and youngest child of Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, is an African American novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Walker’s creative vision is rooted in the economic hardship, racial terror, and folk wisdom of African American life and culture, particularly in the rural South.

Her writing explores multidimensional kinships among women and embraces the redemptive power of social and political revolution.

Walker began publishing her fiction and poetry during the latter years of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Her work, along with that of such writers as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, however, is commonly associated with the post-1970s surge in African American women’s literature.

Official Website – Alice Walker’s Garden

Quotes

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

 

 

From Encyclopedia Britannica. Google and Wikipedia.

Quotable – Malcolm X

Malcolm X

Malcolm X, (1925-1965) born Malcolm Little and later also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. Image from The Source

“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.”

 

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”

 

“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

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Quotable – W.E.B. Du Bois

WEB Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois  (1868-1963) sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, editor, and author. Image from AAIHS.

“A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.”

 

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.”

 

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

Quotable – Langston Hughes 1902-1967

Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes – an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Image from NYDailynews.

“I swear to the Lord I still can’t see why Democracy means Everybody but me.”

 “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”

 “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

 “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?… Or does it explode?”

 “I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

Happy Birthday, William F. Buckley, Jr.!

WF Buckley

William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley; November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded National Review magazine in 1955, which had a major impact in stimulating the conservative movement; hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line (1966–1999), where he became known for his transatlantic accent and wide vocabulary; and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column along with numerous spy novels.

QUOTES

The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry.
A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ’Stop!’

Happy Birthday, Truman Capote!

Truman Capote

Truman Garcia Capote born Truman Streckfus Persons, (September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Many of Capote’s short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a “nonfiction novel”.  At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced of Capote novels, stories, and plays.

QUOTES

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.”

“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go”

From Wikipedia and MomAdvice.

Happy Birthday, Miguel de Cervantes!

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer who is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world’s pre-eminent novelists.

His major work, Don Quixote, is considered the first modern novel,  a classic of Western literature, and is regarded among the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la Lengua de Cervantes (“the language of Cervantes”).  He has also been dubbed El príncipe de los ingenios (“The Prince of Wits”).

QUOTES

“Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

“Facts are the enemy of truth.”

“To be prepared is half the victory.”

 

From Wikipedia and Emaze.

Happy 93rd Birthday, Rosamunde Pilcher!

Rosamunde Pilcher

Born Rosamunde E. M. L. Scott on September 22, 1924, in Lelant, Cornwall, Pilcher’s first book, a romance novel, was published by Mills and Boon, under the pseudonym Jane Fraser. She published a further ten novels under that name. In 1955, she also began writing under her real name with Secret to Tell. By 1965 she had dropped the pseudonym and was signing her own name to all her novels.

At the beginning, writing was a refuge from her daily life. She claims that writing saved her marriage. The real breakthrough in Pilcher’s career came in 1987 when she wrote the family saga, The Shell Seekers. Since then her books have made her one of the more successful contemporary female authors.

The Shell Seekers focuses on Penelope Stern Keeling, an elderly British woman who relives her life in flashbacks, and on her relationship with her adult children. Keeling’s life was not extraordinary, but it spans “a time of huge importance and change in the world.” The novel describes the everyday details of what life during World War II was like for some of those who lived in Britain. The Shell Seekers sold more than five million copies worldwide and was adapted for the stage by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham.

In 1996, her novel Coming Home won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by Romantic Novelists’ Association.

After penning more than forty novels and anthologies, Pilcher retired from writing in 2000. Two years later she was created an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).