Quotomania

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

Benjamin Constant, in full Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, (born Oct. 25, 1767, Lausanne, Switz.—died Dec. 8, 1830, Paris), Franco-Swiss novelist and political writer, the author of Adolphe, a forerunner of the modern psychological novel. The son of a Swiss officer in the Dutch service, whose family was of French origin, he studied at Erlangen, Ger., briefly at the University of Oxford, and at Edinburgh. In 1787 he formed, in Paris, his first liaison, with Madame de Charrière, 27 years his senior. His republican opinions in no way suited him to the office of chamberlain to the duke of Brunswick, which he held for several years. In 1794 he chose the side of the French Revolution, abandoning his office and divorcing his wife, a lady of the court. Madame de Staël had much to do with his decision. Their tumultuous and passionate relationship lasted until 1806.

After the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (1799), Constant was nominated to the tribunate, but he quickly became, like Madame de Staël, an opponent of the Bonapartist regime. Expelled from the tribunate in 1802, he followed her into exile the year after. Thereafter he spent his time either at Madame de Staël’s salon at Coppet, near Geneva, or in Germany, chiefly at Weimar, where he met Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Constant was the associate of the brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel, the pioneers of the Romantic idea, and with them he inspired Madame de Staël’s book De l’Allemagne (“On Germany”).

In 1808 Constant secretly married Charlotte von Hardenberg. But his intellectual relationship with Madame de Staël and the group at Coppet remained unbroken. As a liberal he was disappointed by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, and he reconciled himself with the Napoleonic empire of the Hundred Days under the influence of Madame Récamier, the other great love of his life. On his return to Paris, Constant became one of the leaders of liberal journalism. He was elected a deputy in 1819. After the revolution of July 1830, he was appointed president of the council of state but died the same year.

During his exile, Constant began work on De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes, et ses développements, 5 vol. (1824–31; “On Religion Considered in Its Source, Its Forms, and Its Developments”), a historical analysis of religious feeling. He is better known, however, for his novels. Published in 1816 and written in a lucid and classical style, the autobiographical Adolphe (Eng. trans. Adolphe) describes in minute analytical detail a young man’s passion for a woman older than himself. Nearly 150 years after the publication of Adolphe, another of Constant’s autobiographical novels, Cécile, dealing with events between 1793 and 1808, was discovered and first published. Constant is also known for his Journaux intimes(“Intimate Journals”), first published in their entirety in 1952. They add to the autobiographical picture of Constant provided by his Le Cahier rouge (1907; The Red Notebook).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Constant.

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

Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.

In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After spending a year at a university of Moscow in 1970, Darwish worked at the newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo. He subsequently lived in Beirut, where he edited the journal Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982. In 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel. Darwish served from 1987 to 1993 on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996 he was permitted to return from exile to visit friends and family in Israel and Palestine.

Mahmoud Darwish’s early work of the 1960s and 1970s reflects his unhappiness with the occupation of his native land. Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash noted in their introduction to Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003) that “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.” Forché and Akash commented also on his 20th volume, Mural: “Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibility to the richly veined ore of its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception.” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish.

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

Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/lydiadavis.

For more information about Lydia Davis:

The Cows: https://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/the-cows-lydia-davis

“Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6366/art-of-fiction-no-227-lydia-davis

“Interview with Lydia Davis”: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-lydia-davis/

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

Randall Jarrell was born on May 6, 1914 in Nashville. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College, where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, and then at the University of Texas.

Jarrell’s first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger (Harcourt, 1942), was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He soon left the Air Corps for the U.S. Army and worked as a control tower operator, an experience which provided much material for his poetry.

Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945, while he was still serving in the army, with the publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend (Dial Press, 1945), which bitterly and dramatically documents the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Other volumes followed, all characterized by great technical skill, empathy with the lives of others, and an almost painful sensitivity.

Following the war, Jarrell accepted a teaching position at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and remained there, except for occasional absences to teach elsewhere, until his death. Jarrell is highly regarded not only as a poet, but also as a peerless literary essayist, and was considered the most astute (and most feared) poetry critic of his generation. Robert Lowell, in an essay published after Jarrell’s death, wrote, “What Jarrell’s inner life was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry [...] His gifts, both by nature and by a lifetime of hard dedication and growth, were wit, pathos, and brilliance of intelligence. These qualities, dazzling in themselves, were often so well employed that he became, I think, the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation...Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision, partial like all others, but an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long—or forget.”

Randall Jarrell was struck by a car and killed at the age of fifty-one on October 14, 1965.

From https://poets.org/poet/randall-jarrell.

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

Patti Smith (American, b.1946) is a singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist, known for her role in the punk rock movement of the 1970s. Born in Chicago, and raised in South Jersey, she studied at Glassboro State Teachers College, before moving to New York City in 1967. There, she met and befriended Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she maintained a close friendship and artistic partnership until his death.

Throughout the 1970s, Smith developed a reputation as a poet and performance artist. In 1975, she released her debut album, Horses, which would go on to become one of the most influential and critically successful albums of all time.

In 1979, and continuing into the 1980s, Smith largely disappeared from the public scene, moving to Detroit with her husband, MC5 guitarist, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and devoting herself to domestic life. Following her husband’s death in 1994, Smith returned to the music and art scene, beginning with her successful comeback album, Gone Again.

She has also been featured in a number of art exhibitions, including Strange Messenger at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2002, and Rockaway!, hosted by MoMA PS1 in 2014. In addition, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2005, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

From http://www.artnet.com/artists/patti-smith/biography.

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

Alexander, Freiherr von Humboldt, (born Sept. 14, 1769, Berlin, Prussia—died May 6, 1859, Berlin), was a German naturalist and explorer. In 1792 he joined the mining department of the Prussian government, where he invented a safety lamp and established a technical school for miners. From 1799 he explored Central and South America, traveling in the Amazon jungles and the Andean highlands. During these journeys he discovered the connection between the Amazon and Orinoco river systems and surmised that altitude sickness was caused by lack of oxygen. He studied the oceanic current off the western coast of South America; it became known as the Humboldt Current (now the Peru Current). He returned to Europe in 1804. His research helped lay the foundation for comparative climatology, drew a connection between a region’s geography and its flora and fauna, and added to an understanding of the development of the Earth’s crust. In Paris he used his financial resources to help Louis Agassiz and others launch careers. In 1829 he traveled to Russia and Siberia and made geographic, geologic, and meteorologic observations of Central Asia. During the 1830s he investigated magnetic storms. The last 25 years of his life were spent writing Kosmos, an account of the structure of the universe as then known.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Alexander-von-Humboldt.

For more information about Alexander von Humboldt:

“Who Was Alexander von Humboldt?”: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/who-was-alexander-von-humboldt-180974473/

“Humboldt in the New World”: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/humboldt-in-the-new-world

“The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt”: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/22/very-great-alexander-von-humboldt/

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

Heraclitus, also spelled Heracleitus or Herakleitos, (born c.540 BCE, Ephesus, Anatolia [now Selçuk, Turkey]—died c. 480) was a Greek philosopher remembered for his cosmology, in which fire forms the basic material principle of an orderly universe. Little is known about his life, and the one book he apparently wrote is lost. His views survive in the short fragments quoted and attributed to him by later authors.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heraclitus.

For more information about Herakleitos:

“Heraclitus”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/

7 Greeks: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/7-greeks/

“Davenport’s pleiad”: https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/11/davenports-pleiad

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

Gilles Deleuze, (born January 18, 1925, Paris, France—died November 4, 1995, Paris), was a French writer and antirationalist philosopher. Deleuze began his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1944. Appointed to the faculty there in 1957, he later taught at the University of Lyons and the University of Paris VIII, where he was a popular lecturer. He retired from teaching in 1987.

Two of Deleuze’s early publications, David Hume (1952; with Andre Cresson) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), were historical studies of thinkers who, though in different ways, emphasized the limited powers of human reason and mocked the pretensions of traditional philosophy to discern the ultimate nature of reality. In the 1960s Deleuze began to philosophize in a more original vein, producing two major works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). In the former he argued against the devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried to show that difference inheres in repetition itself.

A central theme of Deleuze’s work during this period was what he called the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western metaphysics—i.e., the preference, which originated with the pre-Socratic school of Eleaticism and the subsequent philosophy of Plato, for unity over multiplicity (“the one” over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According to Deleuze, this bias, which manifests itself in the characteristic philosophical search for the abstract “essences” of things, falsifies the nature of experience, which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In order to do justice to reality as multiplicity, therefore, a completely new set of philosophical concepts is required. Deleuze also criticized traditional metaphysics for its “arboreal” or “treelike” character—i.e., its conception of reality in terms of hierarchy, order, and linearity—and compared his own thought, by contrast, to the structure of a rhizome, an underground plant stem whose growth is aimless and disordered.

Following the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, Deleuze’s thought became more politically engaged. Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of a two-volume work (Capitalism and Schizophrenia) written with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92), is an extended attack on traditional psychoanalysis and the concept of the Oedipus complex, which the authors contend has been used to suppress human desire in the service of normalization and control. The book concludes with a rather naive celebration of schizophrenia as a heroic expression of social nonconformity. In the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), which they present as a study in “nomadology” and “deterritorialization” (the former term suggesting the nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin tribes, the latter a general state of flux and mobility), Deleuze and Guattari condemn all species of rationalist metaphysics as “state philosophy.” In 1995, depressed by chronic illness and his generally deteriorating health, Deleuze committed suicide.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gilles-Deleuze.

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

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1912, Millay entered her poem "Renascence" to The Lyric Year's poetry contest, where she won fourth place and publication in the anthology. This brought her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar College, where she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917). At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

After graduating from Vassar, Millay moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she lived with her sister Norma in a nine-foot-wide attic. Millay published poems in Vanity Fair, the Forum, and others while writing short stories and satire under the pen name Nancy Boyd. She and Norma acted with the Provincetown Players in the group's early days, befriending writers such as poet Witter Bynner, critic Edmund Wilson, playwright and actress Susan Glaspell, and journalist Floyd Dell. Millay publishedA Few Figs from Thistles (Harper & Brothers, 1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922). In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman (Harper & Brothers, 1927).

Millay married Eugen Boissevain in 1923, and the two were together for twenty-six years. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew famous. Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the age of fifty-eight on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

From https://poets.org/poet/edna-st-vincent-millay.

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

Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy. A few years later her parents moved to Yvetot, where they kept a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp (colonie de vacances).

During that summer, living for the first time with a group of people of her own age, she had her first sexual experiences, recounted in her recent work Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story). In this same book, she also writes about her stay in London as an au pair in 1960, and her first attempt at Higher Education which took the form of primary teacher training in Rouen. At the end of the book we see Annie returning to Rouen from London to take a degree in literature, having abandoned her primary school teacher training course. She had also already written the first pages of her first, unpublished novel in London.

The years that followed saw her married with two sons, qualifying as a secondary school teacher in two competitive examinations, the Capès and the still more prestigious agrégation, and teaching French in a secondary school in Annecy, Haute Savoie. One of her rare returns to Normandy coincided with her father’s final illness and death in 1967. In 1974 Annie Ernaux published her first book, Cleaned Out, a fictionalized account of the illegal abortion she underwent in 1964, and her move from working-class to middle-class culture through education. In 1977 the family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town in the Paris region. Ernaux eventually left secondary school teaching and took up a post at the Cned, Centre for Distance Education. She won both literary acclaim in the form of the Prix Renaudot, and a large readership with the publication of her account of her father’s life, A Man’s Place in 1983. After her divorce in the early 1980s, Ernaux remained in her house in Cergy, where she lives to this day. In 2000 she retired from her teaching post, and devoted herself to writing, and in 2008 published The Years, considered by many to be her crowning achievement in terms both of its content and innovative form, intertwining personal and collective history over six decades. The success of this work was recognized by the award of the Marguerite Duras and the François Mauriac prizes, and the English translation shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International.

Her works overall have received the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize, as well as publication of her almost complete works to date in the Quarto edition by Gallimard in 2011 (Ernaux is the first woman writer to be published in this series in her lifetime). In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise. In October 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

From https://www.annie-ernaux.org/biography/.