Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Franz Kafka. Listen in!

Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), was a Czech writer who wrote in German. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he earned a doctorate and then worked successfully but unhappily at a government insurance office from 1907 until he was forced by a case of tuberculosis to retire in 1922. The disease caused his death two years later. Hypersensitive and neurotic, he reluctantly published only a few works in his lifetime, including the symbolic story The Metamorphosis (1915), the allegorical fantasy In the Penal Colony (1919), and the story collection A Country Doctor (1919). His unfinished novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927), published posthumously against Kafka’s wishes, express the anxieties and alienation of 20th-century humanity. His visionary tales, with their inscrutable mixture of the normal and the fantastic, have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Kafka’s posthumous reputation and influence have been enormous, and he is regarded as one of the great European writers of the 20th century.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Franz-Kafka.

Today’s Quotation is care of Mahmoud Darwish. Listen in!

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 G. K. Chesterton. Listen in!

G.K. Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, and theologian who lived and wrote at the turn of the 20th century. He was a prolific writer, producing fiction and nonfiction along with essays, poetry, and plays. Chesterton is best known for his creation of the priest-detective character Father Brown and for his book Orthodoxywhich has become a classic of Christian apologetics.

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

Today’s Quotation is care of Philostratus, the Athenian. Listen in!

Flavius Philostratus, (born AD 170—died c.245) was a Greek writer of Roman imperial times who studied at Athens and some time after AD 202 entered the circle of the philosophical Syrian empress of Rome, Julia Domna. On her death he settled in Tyre.

Philostratus’s works include Gymnastikos, a treatise dealing with athletic training; Ērōïkos(“Hero”), a dialogue on the significance of various heroes of the Trojan War; Epistolai erōtikai(“Erotic Epistles”), one of which was the inspiration for the English poet Ben Jonson’s To Celia(“Drink to me only with thine eyes”); and two sets of descriptions (ekphraseis) of paintings of mythological scenes, attributed to two men named Philostratus, possibly the well-known figure and his grandson. Flavius Philostratus’s Bioi sophistōn (Lives of the Sophists) treats both the Sophists of the 5th century BC and the later philosophers and rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic, a name coined by Philostratus to describe the art of declamation in Greek as practiced in the Roman Empire from the time of Nero (AD 54–68) to Philostratus’s own day.

Philostratus’s work on the life of the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (1st century AD), which was commissioned by Julia Domna, is revealing of religious attitudes in a transitional period. His idealized portrait of Apollonius as an ascetic miracle worker was taken up with enthusiasm by the pagan elites of the next centuries—when Christianity had become of political significance—as a counter figure to the Christian Jesus. In Philostratus’s moderately Atticizing prose (i.e., aspiring to the Classical style of 5th-century-BC Athens and opposed to the florid and bombastic style of Greek associated especially with Asia Minor), formal elegance was a way to give new significance and validity to the traditional cultural heritage of the pagan Greek world.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Flavius-Philostratus.

Today’s Quotation is care of Fran Lebowitz. Listen in!

Fran Lebowitz is a writer and social commentator. Her essays and interviews offer her acerbic views on current events and the media – as well as pet peeves including tourists, baggage-claim areas, after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. The New York Times Book Review calls Lebowitz an "important humorist in the classic tradition."

Her first book, a collection of essays titled Metropolitan Life, was a bestseller, as was a second collection, Social Studies. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Lebowitz’s prose is wickedly entertaining. Her two books are collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, with a new preface by the author. The Fran Lebowitz Reader has been published in nine languages including French, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Lebowitz is also the author of the children’s book, Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas.

Between 2001 to 2007, Lebowitz had a recurring role as Judge Janice Goldberg on the television drama Law & Order. She also had a part in the Martin Scorsese-directed film, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). She can also be seen in various documentary films including the American Experienceseries on New York City, as well as Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016), Regarding Susan Sontag (2014), and Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol(1990), among others. In 2010 Martin Scorsese directed a documentary about Lebowitz for HBO titled Public Speaking. A limited documentary series, Pretend It's a City, also directed by Martin Scorsese, premiered on Netflix in 2021, and was nominated for the 2021 Emmys in the Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series category.

Lebowitz was named to Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 2008. She remains a style icon. Lebowitz lives in New York City, as she does not believe that she would be allowed to live anywhere else.

From https://franlebowitz.com/bio.

Today’s Quotation is care of Graham Greene. Listen in!

Graham Greene, (born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.), British author. After studying at the University of Oxford, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Beginning c. 1930 he worked principally as a freelance journalist for several decades, during which he traveled widely. Stamboul Train (1932; also titled Orient Express; film, 1934) was the first of his “entertainments,” thrillers with considerable moral complexity and depth; others included A Gun for Sale (1936; also titled This Gun for Hire; film, 1942), The Confidential Agent (1939; film, 1945), and The Third Man (1949; film, 1949). His finest novels—Brighton Rock (1938; film, 1948), The Power and the Glory (1940; film, 1962), The Heart of the Matter(1948; film, 1954), and The End of the Affair (1951; film, 1999)—all have distinctly religious themes. Several of his novels set in “third-world” nations on the brink of political upheaval were also adapted as films.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Graham-Greene.

Today’s Quotation is care of Mae West. Listen in!

Mae West, original name Mary Jane West, (born August 17, 1893, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died November 22, 1980, Los Angeles, California), was an American stage and film actress, a sex symbol whose frank sensuality, languid postures, and blasé wisecracking became her trademarks. She usually portrayed women who accepted their lives of dubious virtue with flippant good humor.

West made her debut with a Brooklyn stock company about 1901, and by 1907 she had become a performer on the national vaudeville circuit in partnership with Frank Wallace. She made her Broadway debut as a singer and acrobatic dancer in the revue A la Broadway in 1911. For the next 15 years she alternated between vaudeville and Broadway shows, and she did an occasional nightclub act.

In 1926 West began to write, produce, and star in her own plays on Broadway. In the first of these, Sex (1926), her performance as a prostitute created a sensation but also earned her an eight-day jail sentence for “corrupting the morals of youth,” from which she emerged a national figure. Her plays Diamond Lil (1928) and The Constant Sinner (1931) were also successful. For all the variety of the scripts she wrote, the constant factor was West’s own ironic, languorous personality and her ability to ridicule social attitudes, especially toward sex.

In 1932 West moved to Hollywood. Her first film there, Night After Night (1932), showed the lighthearted approach that was characteristic of her subsequent pictures. She Done Him Wrong (1933), a screen adaptation of Diamond Lil, is memorable for her amusing ability to charge such lines as “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” with suggestive implications. West then wrote and costarred in I’m No Angel (1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), and Klondike Annie (1936), which brought her popularity to its height. In the 1940s and ’50s she sometimes appeared onstage surrounded by young musclemen, including on Broadway in Catherine Was Great(1944). Her films were revived in the 1960s, and she appeared in Myra Breckinridge(1970), an adaptation of a novel by Gore Vidal, and Sextette (1978), based on a play that she wrote.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mae-West.

Today’s Quotation is care of Oscar Wilde. Listen in!

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

From https://www.biography.com/writer/oscar-wilde

Today’s Quotation is care of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Listen in!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (born June 28, 1712, Geneva, Switz.—died July 2, 1778, Ermenonville, France), was a Swiss-French philosopher. At age 16 he fled Geneva to Savoy, where he became the steward and later the lover of the baronne de Warens. At age 30, having furthered his education and social position under her influence, he moved to Paris, where he joined Denis Diderot at the center of the philosophes; he wrote on music and economics for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. His first major work, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), argued that man is good by nature but has been corrupted by society and civilization; Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of man set him apart from Roman Catholic writers who, like him, were hostile to the idea of progress. He also wrote music; his light opera The Cunning-Man (1752) was widely admired. In 1752 he became involved in an influential dispute with Jean-Philippe Rameau over the relative merits of French and Italian music; Rousseau championed the latter. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1754), he argued against Thomas Hobbes that human life before the formation of societies was healthy, happy, and free and that vice arose as the result of social organization and especially the introduction of private property. Civil society, he held, comes into being only to ensure peace and to protect property, which not everyone has; it thus represents a fraudulent social contract that reinforces inequality. In the Social Contract (1762), which begins with the memorable line, “Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” Rousseau argues that a civil society based on a genuine social contract rather than a fraudulent one would provide people with a better kind of freedom in exchange for their natural independence, namely, political liberty, which he understands as obedience to a self-imposed law created by the “general will.” In 1762 the publication of Émile, a treatise on education, produced outrage, and Rousseau was forced to flee to Switzerland. He began showing signs of mental instability c. 1767, and he died insane. His Confessions (1781–88), which he modeled on the work of the same title by St. Augustine, is among the most famous autobiographies.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.

Today’s Quotation is care of Naomi Shihab Nye. Listen in!

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also the author of the young adult novel Habibi, which was named an ALA Notable Book, a Best Book for Young Adults, and winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award as well as the Book Publishers of Texas award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/1339809.