Did he really say that?

The kind of humor I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes = GEORGE CARLIN...Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass–give me plain glass = JOHN FOWLES...Music is the mathematics of the gods = PYTHAGORAS...Nothing is more fluid than language = R.L.SWIHART

Friday, February 15, 2013

Book Quotes From The Gide Man




LET US BEGIN with a truncated request from Andre Gide to his fictional correspondent:

You must make a bonfire in your heart, Nathaniel

SIMPLE QUESTION
When is "Book Quotes" not a redundancy?

SAMPLE ANSWER
Whenever the blockquoted quoted words are about the Art of Reading (or the writing process)

Some books one reads sitting on a narrow bench
In front of a school desk
...
Some I have read in diligences;
Some others lying in a hay loft.
There are some that make us believe
In the existence of the soul;
Others that make us despair of it.
Some that prove there is a God;
Others that fail to.
...
Some books might be thought a little technical;
Others in which there is so much talk of nature,
That after reading them
There is no need to go out for a walk.
...
Some are not worth a penny...
Others extremely valuable.
Some speak of kings and queens,
And others of the very poor




THIS IS ANDRE GIDE IN 1893



According to Wikipedia, The Fruits of the Earth was "written" in 1895, the year in which Andre Gide married Madeleine Rondeaux

Andre Gide was born in 1869
Exactly ninety-seven years before President Kennedy was assassinated.

Mr. Gide won the Nobel Prize in 1947

He was introduced to this blog on a page entitled Greed...Without...The...r





Blogger's Notes
In the blockquote, all the ellipsis and the italics are mine.
Other translations of Mr. Gide's poetry may vary according to other variables but it appears that the poet was a fan of the semi-colon.
This translation from French into English was first published in 1949.

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