Thought of the Day

Thought of the Day is where you’ll find my little snippets of daily knowledge, historical happenings and newsworthy notes; plus of course the inevitable ‘too good not to add them’ quotes.

I’ve linked them to literary quotes and the books or authors they came from. There’s no rhyme nor reason to them, if it catches my eye then it’s likely to be here, and if you know of an upcoming important happening, or historical even that we should feature on our literary calendar, let us know at;

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“Books, the children of the brain”

30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745

Jonathan Swift  was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier’s Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and A Tale of a Tub.

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“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888

Louisa May Alcott  was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.  Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard and under it wrote novels for young adults.

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“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688

John Bunyan was an English writer and Baptist preacher best remembered as the author of the religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons.

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“In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again.”

November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955

James Rufus Agee  was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

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“Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.”
Jonathan Safran Foer – Eating Animals

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill officially establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day on this day in 1941.

The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. A famous Thanksgiving observance occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.

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“With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.”

25 November 1562 – 27 August 1635

Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio  was a Spanish playwright, poet and novelist. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Century of Baroque literature. His reputation in the world of Spanish literature is second only to that of Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature.

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“To have respect for ourselves guides our morals; and to have a deference for others governs our manners.” 

24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768

Laurence Sterne  was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption.

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“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”

September 25, 1930 – May 10, 1999

Sheldon Allan “Shel” Silverstein  was an American poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter, and author of children’s books. He styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have sold over 20 million copie.s

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“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” 

22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot’s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

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“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778

François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of several liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

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“There is a time for all things—Except Marriage my dear“

20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770

Thomas Chatterton  was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. He committed suicide, dying of arsenic poisoning. His works and death were much discussed posthumously and had an influence on the Romantic movement.

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“The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.”

born November 19, 1942

Sharon Olds  is an American poet. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980 She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.

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“The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.“

born November 18, 1939

Margaret Eleanor Atwood,  is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award several times, winning twice. In 2001 she was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada’s writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize

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“There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.”

 17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001

Auberon Alexander Waugh was an English journalist, and eldest son of Evelyn Waugh. He was widely known by his nickname Bron.
After a traditional classical education at Downside School, he was commissioned in the army during National Service, where he was badly injured in a shooting accident. He went on to study for a year at Oxford.
At twenty, he launched his Fleet Street career at the Telegraph Group, though he also wrote for many other media, including Private Eye, presenting a profile that was half Tory grandee and half cheeky rebel. As a young man, Waugh wrote five novels that were quite well received, but gave up fiction, for fear of unfavourable comparisons with his father.

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“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.“

16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature

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“The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.”

15 November 1731 – 25 April 1800

William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him “the best modern poet”, whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak. He was a nephew of the poet Judith Madan.
After being institutionalised for insanity in the period 1763–65, Cowper found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity, the inspiration behind his much-loved hymns. He continued to suffer doubt and, after a dream in 1773, believed that he was doomed to eternal damnation. He recovered and wrote more religious hymns.

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“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.“

24 March 1903 – 14 November 1990

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge,  known as Malcolm Muggeridge, was a British journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy. As a young man, Muggeridge was a left-wing sympathiser but he later became a forceful anti-communist. He is credited with bringing Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West and stimulating debate about Catholic theology. In his later years he became a religious and moral campaigner.

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“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson  was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world.His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he “seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins.”

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“The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.“

29 September 1810 — 12 November 1865

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, published in 1857, was the first biography of the eponymous novelist.

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“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”

11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky  sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky’s literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. Many of his works are marked by a preoccupation with Christianity, explored through the prism of the individual confronted with life’s hardships and beauty.

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“I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area.“

Born 10 November 1960

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards

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“The joy that isn’t shared dies young.”

November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974

Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

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“How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.“

8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912

Abraham “Bram” Stoker  was an Anglo-Irish author, best known today for his 1897 cult Gothic novel, Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

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“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

 9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828 – 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910)

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer regarded as one of the greatest of all time.

He is best known for the long novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. Tolstoy’s fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.

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“Fear shall force what friendship cannot win.“

Baptised 6 November 1558; buried 15 August 1594

Thomas Kyd  was an English playwright, the author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama.

Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins (an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy) discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors (1612). A hundred years later, scholars in Germany and England began to shed light on his life and work, including the controversial finding that he may have been the author of a Hamlet play pre-dating Shakespeare’s, which is now known as the Ur-Hamlet.

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“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. …”

born November 5, 1943

Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child.  Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009.

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“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.”

18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC  was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon, and stood in stark contrast both to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works – most of which were published posthumously – are “Dulce et Decorum est”, “Insensibility”, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, “Futility” and “Strange Meeting”.

Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death. His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration. He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery

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“Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.”

born November 3, 1942

Martin Cruz Smith  is an American mystery novelist. He is best known for his eight-novel series on Russian investigator Arkady Renko, who was first introduced in 1981 with Gorky Park.

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“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950

George Bernard Shaw was a Nobel-Prize-winning British playwright, critic and passionate socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950. Originally earning his way as an influential London music and theater critic, Shaw’s greatest gift was for the modern drama. He wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion. With his range from biting contemporary satire to historical allegory, Shaw became the leading comedy dramatist of his generation and one of the most important playwrights in the English language since the 17th century.

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“Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.”

November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900

Stephen Crane was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

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