Category: Quotations

Shopping – Bombeck and Kinsella

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“The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.” ― Erma Bombeck (February 1927 – April 1996) ― American writer and humourist Erma Bombeck achieved great popularity for her newspaper column which described suburban home life from mid-1960s until late 1990s. She published 15 books, appeared on television shows, and wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, all featuring her entertaining and eloquent humour. Irma Bombeck wrote before social media, achieving world-wide fame through her books, and in 1970s her columns were read twice-weekly by 30 million readers of the 900 newspapers in US and Canada.  Interestingly her work featured domesticity during the women’s liberation movement. She hid a life-long illness which was disclosed three years prior to her death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_Bombeck

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Novelist Marguerite Yourcenar said…

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Marguerite Yourcenar, or Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour, was a French novelist and essayist born in Brussels, Belgium, who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and Erasmus Prize, in 1980 she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française. Her most notable work is historical novel “‎Mémoires d’Hadrien” (Memoirs of Hadrian) and I have read “Denier du Rêve” (retitled A Coin in Nine Hands) set in 1933 over one day in Rome where a ten-lira coin passes through the hands of nine unusual people https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marguerite-Yourcenar The flower buds are Dianella caerulea (commonly known as the blue flax-lily) which turn into small green berries and it grows in a terracotta pot near my kitchen door. GBW.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Quote by Malala Yousafzai

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Malala Yousafzai was born 12 July 1997 in the Swat district of northwest Pakistan, where her father was a school owner, active in educational issues and humanitarian work. Malala Yousafzai became a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the local Taliban had banned girls from attending school. Malala’s advocacy has grown, with acknowledgement and awards world-wide and the establishment of Malala Fund which invests in education programmes to help girls go to school and reach their full potential https://www.malala.org/malalas-story

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Quotation from Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet and translator, and an outspoken literary and political critic.

Not well-known outside Italy, Pavese is numbered highly among the important 20th century authors in his home country.

Born in rural Santo Stefano Belbo, he often returned to the area, enjoying the solitude away from his turbulent career and heartbroken love life.  Pavese was not destined to live long, he died just before his 42 birthday.

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Cesare Pavese (1930) rocking his Harry Potter glasses.

✨ Website Biography and Book Review

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cesare-pavese
https://1streading.wordpress.com/2018/06/24/the-beautiful-summer/

✨ Cesare Pavese Poems

  1. The Cats Will Know
  2. Ancestors
  3. Habits
  4. You Have A Face Of Carved Stone
  5. Death Will Come With Your Eyes
  6. In The Morning You Always Come Back – my favourite
  7. Passion For Solitude from ‘Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950’.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Leonardo da Vinci said…

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Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor and student of all things scientific but he had difficulty waking up in the morning. He wrote “Lying on a feather mattress or quilt will not bring you renown”. One of his earlier inventions was a personal alarm clock powered by water. Based on his elementary diagrams, Leonardo’s device would trigger an alarm by the collection of water dropping into a reservoir at brief intervals. I would have thought the drip, dripping of water all night would have kept him awake. Website https://www.leonardodavinci.net/ ♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

‘Strength without wisdom’ counsels Milton

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What is strength without a double share of wisdom? Strength’s not made to rule, but to subserve, where wisdom bears command.


John Milton (December 1608 – November 1674) was an English poet of the late Renaissance period. He is particularly noted for his epic poem on the fall of Satan and Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden ‘Paradise Lost’ which he composed in blank verse after going blind.

Allow yourself plenty of time to read this legendary poem!

 

‘Poem of the Week: Paradise Lost by John Milton’ a unique viewpoint from of The Guardian who says ‘The muscular blank verse of this great classic reveals a visionary amalgam of the biblical and the classical.’
 https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/jan/07/poem-of-the-week-from-paradise-lost-by-john-milton

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

 

john milton english poet

The distinction is…?

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“Dune grass blows in the wind as a storm brews over Sound of Harris, Berneray beach, Outer Hebrides, Scotland” Image by Cody Duncan 2010.

Quotation from Ivan Illich (1926-2002) who was a Croatian-Austrian philosopher, one of the world’s great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast subjects. He was a critic of modern Western culture and addressed contemporary practices in education, medicine, work, energy usage, transportation and economic development.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/09/guardianobituaries.highereducation

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Writers and Their Imaginations

(c) Walker Art Gallery; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Walker Art Gallery; The Public Catalogue Foundation

“For a consciousness to be capable of imagining…it needs to be free.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Imaginary’.

 

“In a work of fiction, everything is invented, even the things that are not, because once a true event is brought into the realm of the imaginary, it becomes imaginary.”
― Paul Auster, American writer.

 

“Things need not have happened to be true.  Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.”
― Neil Gaiman, ‘The Sandman #19’.

 

“Creativity is the brain’s invisible muscle that, when used and exercised routinely, becomes better and stronger.”
― Ashley Ormon, writer and poet.

 

“Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.”
― Agatha Christie, ‘Murder Is Easy’.

 

“It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience.  Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.”
― Nicola Chiaromonte, Italian author.

 

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

Writing Passion Quotation