📅 February 15, 2017
“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.”
― Miranda July
👓 About the quote:
Happy 43rd birthday, Miranda July! The multi-faceted artist's oeuvre is a testament to trying your hand at everything—she has made work as a writer, musician, filmmaker, actor, and visual artist.
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📅 February 13, 2017
“Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”
― Charles M. Schulz
👓 About the quote:
February 13, 2000: The last original Peanuts comic strip was published 17 years ago today. Poor Charlie Brown's undying love for the little red-haired girl was never returned in the strip.
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📅 February 11, 2017
“Over the river and through the woodTo grandfather's house we go”
― Lydia Maria Francis Child
👓 About the quote:
American activist Lydia Maria Child (born February 11, 1802) may have been the first prominent abolitionist to advocate immediate emancipation without compensation to slave owners—she also wrote anti-slavery fiction. However, Child is best known for her children's poem, Over the River and Through the Wood.
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📅 February 9, 2017
“Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?”
― J.M. Coetzee
👓 About the quote:
Happy 77th birthday, J.M. Coetzee! The reclusive South African writer did not show up to the awards ceremony for his two Booker Prizes, but he did make an appearance when he won the Nobel Prize in 2003.
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📅 February 7, 2017
“We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.”
― Sinclair Lewis
👓 About the quote:
Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis' (born February 7, 1885) most popular novels, Main Street and Babbitt, were satires of American life. As a Yale student, Lewis met Jack London and sold him plots for 14 short stories, earning $70.
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📅 February 5, 2017
“It's amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday.”
― John Guare
👓 About the quote:
Happy 79th birthday, John Guare! The American playwright is known for work that is at once comic and emotionally devastating, like his first (and most famous) play, The House of Blue Leaves.
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📅 February 3, 2017
“When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”
― Paul Auster
👓 About the quote:
Happy 70th birthday, Paul Auster! As a novelist, he is preoccupied with the concept of chance. At 14, Auster was standing next to a friend who was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning.
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📅 February 1, 2017
“Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.”
― Langston Hughes
👓 About the quote:
Harlem Renaissance heavyweight Langston Hughes' (born February 1, 1902) work focused on the black experience in America. He was also an originator of Jazz Poetry, a syncopated form that influenced the Beat generation.
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📅 January 30, 2017
“This is the world as it is. This is where you start.”
― Saul D. Alinsky
👓 About the quote:
Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909-June 12, 1972) was a Chicago-born community organizer and writer often considered the founder of modern community organizing. He worked to improve the living conditions of poorer communities across North America. Alinsky is known for his 1971 book Rules for Radicals which counsels activists on achieving change and knowing “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.”
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📅 January 28, 2017
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”
― Jane Austen
👓 About the quote:
On January 28, 1813, Jane Austen’s second novel Pride and Prejudice was published. The beloved classic follows Elizabeth Bennett on a comic, sharply observed, and romantic journey of manners, morality, and marriage amid the English landed gentry. An enduring favorite since publication, the novel has been adapted numerous times for film and television and spawned hundreds of spin-off books.
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📅 January 26, 2017
“Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. ”
― James J. Frey
👓 About the quote:
On January 26, 2006, Oprah Winfrey berated author James Frey on her talk show for presenting his bestselling book A Million Little Pieces as a memoir when parts of it were found to have been exaggerated or made up. Oprah, who had promoted Frey’s debut told him she felt "duped" and that, "more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers." Frey acknowledged that a report claiming he’d made up parts of the memoir was accurate. A note to readers from Frey was included in later editions of the book in which he apologized for fabricating parts of the book
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📅 January 24, 2017
“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”
― Edith Wharton
👓 About the quote:
Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862-August 11, 1937) was born into a wealthy New York family and used her insider’s view of America’s privileged classes to depict old moneyed society with humor, wit, and brilliance. In 1921 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Age of Innocence, her 12th novel. Her other books include The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.
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📅 January 22, 2017
“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― George Gordon Byron
👓 About the quote:
George Gordon Byron, more commonly known as Lord Byron, was an influential British poet who lived from January 22, 1788 to April 19, 1824. Alongside Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Byron was a key figure in the Romantic movement and is considered one of the greatest British poets. His best-known works include the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric poem "She Walks in Beauty."
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📅 January 20, 2017
“Joy multiplies when it is shared among friends, but grief diminishes with every division. That is life.”
― R.A. Salvatore
👓 About the quote:
Happy birthday, R.A. Salvatore! The successful American fantasy author, full name Robert Anthony Salvatore, was born on January 20, 1959. Over the past three decades, Salvatore has written more than 50 titles and sold some 20 million books. He is best known for The Demon Wars series, his Forgotten Realms novels, and Vector Prime, the first novel in his Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series.
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📅 January 18, 2017
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
― A.A. Milne
👓 About the quote:
Alan Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882-January 31, 1956) was a British novelist and playwright best known for his world-famous Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books. The books focused on a young boy named Christopher Robin after his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and various characters inspired by the boy’s stuffed animals including his bear, who was originally called Edward but renamed Winnie-the-Pooh after a Canadian bear named Winnie (for Winnipeg) that Christopher had seen at London Zoo.
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📅 February 14, 2017
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
👓 About the quote:
Happy Valentine's Day! Today's quote comes from an American science-fiction writer who was often called the "dean of science fiction writers." Robert A. Heinlein's works include Strangers in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers.
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📅 February 12, 2017
“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln
👓 About the quote:
American president Abraham Lincoln's (born February 12, 1809) favorite childhood books included: Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.
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📅 February 10, 2017
“Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone, But as the meaning of all things that are.”
― Dante Gabriel Rossetti
👓 About the quote:
February 10, 1862: Poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife, Lizzie Siddal, died 152 years ago today. At her funeral the distraught husband lay the only manuscript of his poems to rest in his wife's coffin. Seven years later, he had her body exhumed and retrieved his work.
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📅 February 8, 2017
“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.”
― Kate Chopin
👓 About the quote:
Kate Chopin (born February 8, 1850) wrote the early feminist novel The Awakening. She first began writing on the advice of her doctor, who thought that it would be therapeutic after the close deaths of her mother and her husband.
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📅 February 6, 2017
“Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity.”
― Mary Leakey
👓 About the quote:
Paleoanthropologist and author Mary Leakey (born February 6, 1913) was interested in archaeology from a young age—she went on to discover a robust australopithecine fossil at Olduvai Gorge that changed the way we understand the scale of evolution.
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📅 February 4, 2017
“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”
― Stewart O'Nan
👓 About the quote:
Happy 56th birthday, Stewart O'Nan! The novelist has also co-authored books with Stephen King and published a screenplay about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
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📅 February 2, 2017
“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy
👓 About the quote:
Happy Groundhog Day! According to tradition, if a groundhog peeps out of its burrow and doesn't see its shadow, spring will come early. The largest celebration is held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania..
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📅 January 31, 2017
“You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.”
― Norman Mailer
👓 About the quote:
Norman Mailer (January 31, 1923-November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director who won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. He is considered one of the innovators of New Journalism, a style of writing that brought literary styles and techniques to the reporting of real-life events. Mailer also co-founded The Village Voice, the weekly paper initially distributed in Greenwich Village.
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📅 January 29, 2017
“If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.”
― Romain Rolland
👓 About the quote:
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866-30 December, 1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, essayist, and art historian. A lifelong pacifist, he was active in the fight against fascism and the search for world peace. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings."
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📅 January 27, 2017
“The aims of life are the best defense against death.”
― Primo Levi
👓 About the quote:
On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp. Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi was among those freed. The author of several books, novels, short story collections, and poems, Levi is best-known for If This Is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent in the death camp, and his memoir told through the metaphor of chemistry The Periodic Table. January 27 is designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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📅 January 25, 2017
“But I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.”
― Gloria Naylor
👓 About the quote:
Gloria Naylor (January 25, 1950-September 28, 2016) was an acclaimed American novelist who received numerous honors for her fiction chronicling the experiences of black women. Her most popular work, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award for first fiction in 1983 and was made into a miniseries starring Oprah Winfrey. Her other books include Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Café. In addition to novels, Naylor wrote essays and screenplays.
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📅 January 23, 2017
“There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”
― Stendhal
👓 About the quote:
Stendhal, the pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle, was a French writer born January 23, 1783, who is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism because of his interest in his characters’ psychology. He is best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
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📅 January 21, 2017
“Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.”
― Gretel Ehrlich
👓 About the quote:
Happy birthday, Gretel Ehrlich! The American travel writer, novelist, essayist, and poet, was born on January 21, 1946, near Santa Barbara, California. She began writing full-time while living on a ranch in Wyoming in 1978 following the death of a loved one. Her 1985 debut, The Solace of Open Spaces, is a collection of essays on rural life in Wyoming.
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📅 January 19, 2017
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
👓 About the quote:
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) is best known for his haunting poetry and tales of the macabre. His most famous works include The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher. A key figure in American Dark Romanticism, Poe is also credited as being the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in science fiction.
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📅 January 17, 2017
“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”
― Anne Brontë
👓 About the quote:
The youngest of the Brontë literary family, Anne Brontë was born on January 17, 1820. As well as poetry, she wrote two novels: Agnes Grey, based on her experiences as a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was considered scandalous at the time for its depiction of a woman who leaves her drunken, abusive husband. Anne’s books, written in a straightforward, naturalistic style, contrast with the romanticism of those by her sisters, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, but both became classics. Anne died in 1849 at the age of 29.
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