Posts Tagged ‘quotes’
Happy Birthday, Lord Byron: 225-years-old
Lord Byron in Turkish Garb
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, who later changed it to George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, English poet, towering personality, and leading figure in the Romantic movement, was born January 22, 1788.
“A man of genius whose heart is perverted,” William Wordsworth called Lord Bryon.
“The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature,” George Eliot called Lord Byron.
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron.
“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Goethe called Lord Byron.
(“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Lord Byron called Goethe.)
Byron was nine-years-old when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.
(Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.)
Quoth Lord Byron’s friend, the fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter from Venice:
The most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted, countesses smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sorts of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.
“Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him,” reads a line from Lord Byron’s journal, regarding Sir Walter Scot.
The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne once played Lord Byron in a bad B movie called Gothic:
“As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others,” wrote Lord Byron.
“Lord Byron — the 6th Baron Byron — club-footed and handsome, whose full name was George Gordon Noel Byron, was as much a genius of personality as he was of poetry. He was only thirty-six when he died, yet he had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth. Nonetheless, every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.”
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
It’s strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this –
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
Wrote Byron in Don Juan.
Lord Byron, one of the pulpiest of them all, 1788 – 1824, RIP.
Lord Byron: One Of The Pulpiest
Lord Byron in Turkish Garb
“The most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature,” George Eliot called Lord Byron.
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Caroline Lamb said of Lord Byron.
“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Goethe called Lord Byron.
“The greatest poetic genius of our century,” Lord Byron called Goethe.
Byron was nine-years-old when he was introduced to sex by his nurse, one May Gray.
(Goethe did not go to bed with a woman until he was forty.)
Quoth Lord Byron’s friend, the fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter from Venice:
The most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted, countesses smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sorts of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets.
“Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him,” reads a line from Lord Byron’s journal, regarding Sir Walter Scot.
The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne once played Lord Byron in a bad B movie called Gothic:
“As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others,” wrote Lord Byron.
“Lord Byron — the 6th Baron Byron — club-footed and handsome, whose full name was George Gordon Noel Byron, was as much a genius of personality as he was of poetry. He was only thirty-six when he died, yet he had already grown overweight and flaccid, with thinning hair and abominable teeth. Nonetheless, every second town in Greece would name a public square after him.”
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
It’s strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this –
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
Wrote Byron in Don Juan.
Lord Byron, one of the pulpiest of them all, 1788 – 1824.
Writers On Writers
“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as.
Rat-eyed Somerset
“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner.
“Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner.
“Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary,” William Faulkner said of Ernest Hemingway.
In response to which Hemingway:
“Does Faulkner really think big emotions come from big words?”
Dostoievsky
“He wore a gray suit, black shoes, white shirt, tie and vest. His appearance never changed. He came down in the morning in his suit, and he would still be wearing it the last thing at night,” said John Huston of John Paul Sartre.
“Reedy and kind,” Truman Capote once described Albert Camus as.
Kind and reedy Camus
“As a writer, he chews more than he bites off,” said Whistler of Henry James.
“An illiterate, underbred book,” Virginia Woolf called James Joyce’s Ulysses — which, however, she and her husband Leonard published.
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,” said Oscar Wilde.
“An enormous dungheap,” Voltaire described the entire body of Shakespeare’s work as. And went on to call Shakespeare “An amiable barbarian.”
Unquote.
“You have written a good book,” Victor Hugo told Gustav Flaubert in a letter, regarding Madame Bovary.
“House of the Dead is Dostoevsky’s best book,” said Tolstoy.
“That’s not writing — it’s typing,” Truman Capote said of Kerouac’s On the Road.
“A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man,” Ernest Hemingway said of T.S. Eliot.
“I find it impossible to take him seriously as a major writer and have never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can,” said Edmund Wilson of Franz Kafka.
“A cursed, conceited, wily heathen,” said Martin Luther of Aristotle.
“He was a bum poet, of course, being a bum person,” Robert Graves said of D.H. Lawrence.
“Like many of us he was rather disgusting
with his deliberate dirtiness, his myopia, his smell,
his undying enmity for unfavorable reviewers,
his stinginess, his coy greed for titles, money, and gowns,
his contempt for Cockneys and Americans,
Sallow, greasy, handsome …”
Said the poet Karl Shapiro of the poet Lord Alfred Tennyson.
“I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature,” Cormac McCarthy said of Henry James and Marcel Proust.
Extraordinarily handsome Menander
That Menander was extraordinarily handsome,” wrote David Markson.
