January 1, 2015

Good Morning! Here are your daily birthday quotations...

E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970):

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

and

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”

and

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

and

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

and

“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

and

“Only connect!”

J.D. Salinger (1919 – 2010):

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”

and

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

and

“I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.”

and

“Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.”

and

“There are still a few men who love desperately.”

and

“If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.”

Joe Orton (1933 – 1967):

“Cleanse my heart... Give me the ability to rage correctly.”

James Richardson (1950 - ):

“The despair of the blank page: it is so full.”

and

“The best time is stolen time.”

and

“Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.”

and

“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.”

and

“The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.”