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.”

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 – Langston Hughes 1902-1967

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, Sir William Golding!

Sir William Gerald Golding CBE (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was also awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.

Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.”

QUOTES

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

“The greatest ideas are the simplest.”

“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.”

From Wikipedia and Google.

Happy Birthday, Roald Dahl!

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl (September 13, 1916-November 23, 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and fighter pilot. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Dahl is best known for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

QUOTES

“A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.”

“So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place, you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.”

“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.”

From Wikipedia and Google.

Happy Birthday, D.H. Lawrence!

DH Lawrence

D.H.( David Herbert) Lawrence (September 11, 1885-March 2, 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic, and painter. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization.

Lawrence is best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In these books, Lawrence explores the possibilities for life within an industrial setting. In particular, Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such a setting. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence, in fact, uses his characters to give form to his personal philosophy. His depiction of sexuality, though seen as shocking when his work was first published in the early 20th century, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being.

QUOTES

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”

“Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.”

From Wikipedia and Google.

Happy Birthday, Alfred Tennyson!

Tennyson photo

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as Break, Break, Break, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tears, Idle Tears, and Crossing the Bar. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as Ulysses, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, Ulysses, and Tithonus. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success. A number of phrases from Tennyson’s work have become commonplaces of the English language, including “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (In Memoriam A.H.H.), “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”, “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”, “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure”, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers”, and “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”. He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

QUOTE:

“I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”

From Wikipedia and Britannica

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Happy Birthday, Gwendolyn Brooks #Author #Poet

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen making her the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer.

Throughout her prolific writing career, Brooks received many more honors. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position held until her death, and what is now the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1985–86 term. In 1976, she became the first African-American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.