Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Homer. Listen in!

Homer, (flourished 9th or 8th century BCE, Ionia?), was an ancient Greek poet and presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though almost nothing is known of his life, tradition holds that Homer was blind. The ancient Greeks attributed to him the great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern scholars generally agree that he composed (but was not the original creator of) the Iliad, most likely relying on oral traditions, and at least inspired the composition of the Odyssey.

The Iliad, set during the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home from the war. The two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture in the Classical age, and they have remained among the most significant poems of the European tradition. The method of their composition has been long debated.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Homer-Greek-poet.

Today’s Quotation is care of Ralph Harper. Listen in!

Ralph Harper (1916–1996) was an adjunct professor of humanities at the Johns Hopkins University and a rector of St. James Church in Monkton, Maryland. He is the author of twelve books, including The Seventh Solitude, Human Love, The World of the Thriller, The Existential Experience, and Journey from Paradise, which were published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

From https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/9239/presence.

Today’s Quotation is care of Juan Ramón Jiménez. Listen in!

Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. His many works include La soledad sonora (Revista de Archivos, 1911), Platero y yo (Ediciones de la Lectura, 1914), Diario de un poeta recién casado (Casa Editorial Calleja, 1917), Canción (Editorial Signo, 1935), and Animal de fondo(Editorial Pleamar, 1949). He died on May 29, 1958.

From https://poets.org/poet/juan-ramon-jimenez.

Today’s Quotation is care of Ocean Vuong. Listen in!

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Timesbestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 36 languages.  A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.

From https://www.oceanvuong.com/about.

Today’s Quotation is care of Marina Tsvetaeva. Listen in!

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (also Marina Cvetaeva and Marina Tsvetayeva) was born in Moscow. During her lifetime she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most renowned poets of 20th-century Russia. Tsvetaeva’s life coincided with turbulent years in Russian history. She married Sergei Efron in 1912; they had two daughters and later one son. Efron joined the White Army, and Tsvetaeva was separated from him during the Civil War. She had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam, and a longer relationship with Sofia Parnok. During the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva was forced to place her daughters in a state orphanage, where the younger, Irina, died of hunger in 1919. In 1922 she emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, settling in Paris in 1925. In Paris, the family lived in poverty. Sergei Efron worked for the Soviet secret police, and Tsvetaeva was shunned by the Russian expatriate community of Paris. Through the years of privation and exile, poetry and contact with poets sustained Tsvetaeva. She corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, and she dedicated work to Anna Akhmatova.

In 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union. Efron was executed, and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Collections of Tsvetaeva’s poetry translated into English include Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein (1971, 1994). She is the subject of several biographies as well as the collected memoirs No Love Without Poetry (2009), by her daughter Ariadna Efron (1912–1975).

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marina-tsvetaeva.

Today’s Quotation is care of Groucho Marx. Listen in!

Groucho was born Julius Henry Marx on Oct 2 1890 in New York. He was the third of the five surviving sons of Sam and Minnie Marx. He was the first of the brothers to start a stage career aged 15 in an act called The Leroy Trio. Other acts followed, but none of them was a great success. Twice the other members of the act disappeared overnight and left him penniless in places far away from home.

When his Brothers came on stage they finally had success with the musical comedy called I'll Say She Is. It was at one of the performances of this show that Groucho got his painted moustache. He arrived late at the theater and used greasepaint to create a moustache. He found this so much easier than a glued-on moustache that he insisted on using this technique from then on. I'll Say She Is is was followed by two more Broadway hits - The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. The latter of which has the character of Captain Spaulding which remained (with the song Hooray for Captain Spaulding) a trademark for Groucho for the rest of his life.

The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were also the first movies (except for one unreleased) made by the Brothers and were filmed in New York. The remaining movies were made in Hollywood. In the later years of the Brothers movie career Groucho started working on radio. He hosted several programmes and was a guest on many shows. His biggest success was the comedy quiz show You Bet Your Life which started in 1947. The show later moved to television and was on the air until 1961.

Groucho also appeared in a few movies without his brothers. Always being a liberal, Groucho sometimes made critical remarks about politics and had friends who were regarded as communist by the US of the 1950s. This led to Groucho being investigated by the FBI.

When Marx Brothers became popular again in the late sixties/early seventies Groucho made a comeback with a show in Carnegie Hall in 1972. At the film festival in Cannes in 1972 he was made Commandeur des Arts et Lettres and in 1974 he received a special Academy Award for the achievements of the Marx Brothers. Groucho died on August 19th 1977 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. His ashes are at Eden Memorial Park, San Fernando, California.

From https://www.marx-brothers.org/biography/groucho.htm.

Today’s Quotation is care of Isaac Newton. Listen in!

Sir Isaac Newton, (born Jan. 4, 1643, Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died March 31, 1727, London), was an English physicist and mathematician. The son of a yeoman, he was raised by his grandmother. He was educated at Cambridge University (1661–65), where he discovered the work of René Descartes. His experiments passing sunlight through a prism led to the discovery of the heterogeneous, corpuscular nature of white light and laid the foundation of physical optics. He built the first reflecting telescope in 1668 and became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669. He worked out the fundamentals of calculus, though this work went unpublished for more than 30 years. His most famous publication, Principia Mathematica (1687), grew out of correspondence with Edmond Halley. Describing his works on the laws of motion (see Newton’s laws of motion), orbital dynamics, tidal theory, and the theory of universal gravitation, it is regarded as the seminal work of modern science. He was elected president of the Royal Society of London in 1703 and became the first scientist ever to be knighted in 1705. During his career he engaged in heated arguments with several of his colleagues, including Robert Hooke (over authorship of the inverse square relation of gravitation) and G.W. Leibniz (over the authorship of calculus). The battle with Leibniz dominated the last 25 years of his life; it is now well established that Newton developed calculus first, but that Leibniz was the first to publish on the subject. Newton is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Isaac-Newton.

Today’s Quotation is care of Homer. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Homer, (flourished 9th or 8th century BCE, Ionia?), was an ancient Greek poet and presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though almost nothing is known of his life, tradition holds that Homer was blind. The ancient Greeks attributed to him the great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern scholars generally agree that he composed (but was not the original creator of) the Iliad, most likely relying on oral traditions, and at least inspired the composition of the Odyssey.

The Iliad, set during the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home from the war. The two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture in the Classical age, and they have remained among the most significant poems of the European tradition. The method of their composition has been long debated.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Homer-Greek-poet.

Today’s Quotation is care of Adam Zagajewski. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Poet, novelist, essayist Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów on June 21, 1945. He spent his childhood in Silesia and then in Cracow, where he graduated from Jagiellonian University.

Zagajewski first became well known as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68' or the Polish New Wave (Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most famous contemporary poets. His books of poetry in English include Asymmetry: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Eternal Enemies: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), and Mysticism for Beginners (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), all translated by Clare Cavanagh.

He is also the author of a memoir, Another Beauty (2000, translated by Clare Cavanagh) and the prose collections, Two Cities(1995, translated by Lillian Vallee) and Solitude and Solidarity (1990, translated by Lillian Vallee). His poems and essays have been translated into many languages. Among his honors and awards are a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberté, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1988, he has served as Visiting Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. In 2010, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as co-editor of Zeszyty literackie (Literary Review), which is published in Paris. Zagajewski lived in Paris and Houston, Texas until his death on March 21, 2021.

From https://poets.org/poet/adam-zagajewski.

Today’s Quotation is care of Salman Rushdie. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen novels—including Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; and Quichotte—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/26491/salman-rushdie.