h1.
Catherine Cookson (1906-1998) - Dame Catherine (Ann) Cookson, née McMullen; birthdate officially 27.6.1906; also wrote as Catherine Marchant.
"But he had taught her to love, and that was a different thing; he had taught her that the act of love wasn't merely a physical thing, its pleasure being halved without the assistance of the mind.
But it was Mr Burgess, this old man breathing his last here now, who had taught her how to use her mind.
Right from the beginning he had warned her that once your mind took you below the surface of mundane things, you would never again know real peace because the mind was an adventure, it led you into strange places and was forever asking why, and as the world outside could not give you true answers, you were forever groping and searching through your spirit for the truth."
(from Tilly Trotter Wed, 1981)
h2.
" This used to be among my prayers - a piece of land not so very large, which would contain a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and beyond these a bit of wood."
h5.
"The main feature, or rather the main note which resounds through every page of Tolstoi, even the seemingly unimportant ones, is love, compassion for Man in general (and not only for the humiliated and the offended), pity of some sort for his weakness, his insignificance, for the shortness of his life, the vanity of his desires... Yes, Tolstoi is for me the dearest, the deepest, the greatest of all artists. But this concerns the Tolstoi of yesterday, who has nothing in common with the exasperating moralist and theorizer of today."
(the composer Peter Tchaikovsky in Vladimir Volkoff's biography Tchaikovsky: A Self-portrait, 1975)
'He presented interacting characters with contrasting views or ideas, any of which may be used as a key to read the text as a whole.'
'Hardy's work reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life.'
"Critics can never be made to understand that the failure may be greater than the success...
To have the strength to roll a stone weighting a hundredweight to the top of a mountain is a success, and to have the strength to roll a stone of then hundredweight only halfway up that mount is a failure. But the latter is two or three times as strong a deed."
(Hardy in his diary, 1907)
Maugham collected his literary experiences in THE SUMMING UP (1938), which has been used as a guidebook for creative writing.
"Most people cannot see anything, but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating."
"It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it."
"Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, for they would understand at first sight and are not used to seek for principles.
And others, on the contrary, who are accustomed to reason from principles, do not at all understand matters of feeling, seeking principles and being unable to see at a glance."
Pascal
Facing the immensity of the universe, Pascal felt horror - "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." For him the world seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance without Christianity, which he defended against the assaults of freethinkers.
"Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing.
His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic."
(T.S. Eliot in Selected Essays, 1960)
