Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 11

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Q1689

DriveLiterature

Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, her books out of print. Thirteen years later the novelist Alice Walker travelled to Florida, found the plot, and paid for a headstone. Hurston is now taught everywhere.

She had been a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, trained as an anthropologist, and wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks. But her insistence on writing Black southern life in its own voice fell out of fashion, and she died working as a maid, her funeral paid for by donations. Walker's 1975 essay 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston' brought her back into print almost single-handedly. The headstone Walker chose reads: a genius of the South.

Literary historyRead card

Q1690

DriveLiterature

John Kennedy Toole could not get his comic novel published and took his own life at thirty-one. His mother spent the next eleven years pressing the manuscript on anyone who would take it. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Thelma Toole was repeatedly turned away before she cornered the novelist Walker Percy, then teaching in New Orleans, and effectively refused to leave until he read it. Percy began expecting to find a reason to stop and instead could not put it down. It was published in 1980, twelve years after his death, and won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1981. The story is often told as a triumph, and it is also a hard one: the recognition arrived far too late for the person who needed it. If any of this is close to home, please talk to someone you trust.

Literary historyRead card

Q1866

WonderArchaeology

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri preserve literary works beside contracts, tax records, letters and shopping lists recovered from ancient Egyptian rubbish deposits.

Dry sand preserved a radically mixed archive: fragments of Sappho and lost plays sit beside rent disputes, school exercises and private anxieties. More than a century after excavation began, the collection is still being joined, read and published, fragment by fragment. Its power lies in both scale and disorder. The written life of a city—handled, corrected and discarded—is being reassembled across generations.

Oxyrhynchus PapyriRead card

Q1979

WonderScience

Émilie du Châtelet's French Principia did more than translate Newton: its extensive commentary clarified his physics and remains the standard complete French edition.

Du Châtelet translated Newton's dense Latin into French, checked the mathematics and added substantial explanations and commentary, completing the project near the end of her life. She also defended vis viva as proportional to mass times velocity squared, a precursor of kinetic energy. Translation in her hands was neither clerical nor secondary; it was a form of exacting scientific authorship.

Émilie du ChâteletRead card

Q1980

WonderScience

Mary Somerville's 1834 synthesis On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences linked astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology for a broad reading public.

Somerville did not dilute difficult knowledge; she revealed its connections. Her book moved from celestial mechanics to light, electricity, magnetism and the Earth, showing how discoveries in one domain changed questions in another. In reviewing it, William Whewell coined the word scientist. The new noun followed a book that had already demonstrated the unity it needed to name.

Mary SomervilleRead card

Q2019

DriveLiterature

Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book, 'Little House in the Big Woods', in 1932 at the age of 65 — then spent her late sixties and seventies writing the pioneer childhood series that made her one of the century's best-loved authors.

She was no complete beginner — for years she had written a farm column for a Missouri paper — but the books were something new: her frontier childhood of the 1870s and 80s, recalled in her sixties with a clear, warm plainness. Readers sometimes assume a life's defining work must announce itself early. Wilder's waited until most people's careers are ending, and then outlived them all.

Laura Ingalls WilderRead card

Q2020

DriveLiterature

Harry Bernstein wrote for a lifetime and watched roughly forty manuscripts get rejected. Grieving his wife, he wrote 'The Invisible Wall' in his nineties; it was published in 2007, when he was 96, and three more books followed.

The memoir — a Jewish boyhood on a Lancashire street divided by an invisible sectarian wall — sat in a publisher's pile for about a year before anyone read it. Bernstein had begun it at 93, after his wife Ruby's death ended a 67-year marriage, because the nights were unbearable without work. He said his nineties were the most productive years of his life. He died at 101, a debut author for four years.

Harry BernsteinRead card

Q2021

DriveLiterature

Toni Morrison published 'The Bluest Eye' in 1970 at 39, written in the hours before dawn while she edited other people's books by day and raised two sons on her own. In 1993 she became the first Black woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

'Writing before dawn began as a necessity — I had small children,' she later told the Paris Review. The necessity became a ritual: she liked to watch the light arrive with coffee, before the day claimed her. Morrison spent nearly twenty years as a book editor, championing other Black writers, while building one of the great bodies of American fiction in the margins of her own mornings.

Toni MorrisonRead card

Q2022

DriveLiterature

Stephen King crumpled the opening pages of 'Carrie' into the bin. His wife Tabitha fished them out, read them, and told him to keep going. The hardback earned a $2,500 advance — then the paperback rights sold for $400,000.

As King tells it in 'On Writing', he was teaching English and living in a trailer, doubting he could write a teenage girl at all. Tabitha's verdict — you've got something here — kept the book alive. The news of the paperback sale came in a phone call on Mother's Day 1973; King says he sat down on the doorstep, needing to. 'Carrie' appeared in 1974 and the trailer years were over.

Stephen KingRead card

Q2023

DriveLiterature

When no publisher would take his 1935 collection, E. E. Cummings printed it with money from his mother and called it 'No Thanks'. The dedication lists the fourteen publishers who turned it down — typeset in the shape of a funeral urn.

The fourteen names — Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Random House and the rest — descend the page in a neat column that readers have long seen as a little urn, as if the rejections were being given a decent burial. Cummings was already a known poet; the book still could not find a home. He answered with typography instead of bitterness, and the joke outlived every refusal.

E. E. CummingsRead card

Q2033

DriveLiterature

José Saramago published a first novel at 24 — then three decades passed before his next. The breakthrough, 'Baltasar and Blimunda', came in 1982 when he was 60. Sixteen years later he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In between came decades as a welder's apprentice's son making his way: metalworker's trade school, years as a proofreader, translator and newspaper editor, and a long stretch — nineteen years — without publishing a book at all. When the novels finally arrived they came in a flood, in his unmistakable river-long sentences. Asked about the late start, he was unbothered: the writer he became, he suggested, simply had not existed earlier.

José SaramagoRead card

Q2052

WonderLiterature

Mark Twain was born on 30 November 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet swung round the sun. In 1909 he said he expected to go out with it. He died on 21 April 1910 — one day after the comet's return.

As his biographer recorded it, Twain called himself and the comet 'two unaccountable freaks' who had come in together and must go out together. The dates in question are the comet's perihelions — its closest passes round the sun — which frame his life almost exactly: born a fortnight after one, gone a day after the next. Halley's returns roughly every 76 years; it is due again in 2061.

Mark Twain and Halley's CometRead card

Q2053

WonderArt

On Monday 12 March 1951, an American newspaper panel called 'Dennis the Menace' launched in sixteen papers — and in Britain, a comic starring a different naughty boy with exactly the same name went on sale. Neither camp knew of the other.

Hank Ketcham drew his blond, well-meaning menace in California; DC Thomson's Dundee office built its scowling, jumper-wearing one for The Beano, whose issue went on sale that same Monday under a cover date of 17 March. When the twin debuts came to light, both sides investigated and concluded it was pure coincidence — two cultures, one irresistible name. Both boys are still in print, three-quarters of a century on.

A transatlantic coincidenceRead card

Q2055

WonderLiterature

Cast in a film of 'The Girl from Petrovka', Anthony Hopkins searched London's bookshops for the novel in vain — then spotted a copy abandoned at Leicester Square station. It turned out to be the author's own, lost by a friend, notes in the margins.

The punchline arrived later, during filming, when author George Feifer mentioned he no longer owned a copy of his own novel — he had lent an annotated one to a friend, who lost it in London. Hopkins produced the station foundling; the margins matched. The story rests on the two men's own telling, repeated consistently for decades, and details shift slightly between versions — which is exactly how the best coincidence stories travel.

As told by Anthony Hopkins and George FeiferRead card

Q2057

WonderHistory

The Codex Gigas, made in Bohemia in the early 1200s, stands almost a metre tall, runs to 310 calfskin leaves and weighs some 75 kilograms. Analysis of the script points to a single scribe, working for decades.

Legend calls it the Devil's Bible: a monk, walled up for his sins, supposedly wrote it in a single night with unholy help — which is folklore, though the book does contain a famous full-page portrait of the devil. The sober scholarship is stranger in its way: one patient hand, perhaps twenty to thirty years, copying an entire Bible, encyclopaedias, chronicles and cures into a single volume. Swedish troops carried it off from Prague in 1648, and it rests in Stockholm today.

Codex GigasRead card

Q2072

WonderLanguage

The writer Horace Walpole invented 'serendipity' in a 1754 letter, borrowing from a Persian tale about the three princes of Serendip, who kept making discoveries 'by accidents and sagacity' of things they were not looking for.

Serendip is an old name for Sri Lanka, and Walpole's princes were not merely lucky — they noticed things, and reasoned from them. That double engine, accident plus sagacity, is why the word earns its keep in the history of science: penicillin, X-rays and the microwave oven all began as interruptions that a prepared mind refused to ignore. Walpole coined many words; this one survived because chance favours those who pay attention.

Horace Walpole, 1754Read card

Q2073

DriveLiterature

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

By 1981 Morrison had already tested the advice on herself. She wrote her first novel, 'The Bluest Eye', in the early mornings before her editing job at Random House, raising two sons alone. She wanted a book about a Black girl taught to hate her own face, and no such book was on the shelf. The line is not really about ambition. It is about absence: notice what is missing, then accept that the gap is your work.

Toni Morrison, speech to the Ohio Arts Council (1981)Read card

Q2074

StillnessLiterature

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Morrison ended her Nobel lecture with these four sentences. The speech is built on a parable: children hold a bird behind their backs and ask a blind old woman whether it is alive or dead, and she answers that she cannot know — what she knows is that it is in their hands. The bird is language. It can be killed by carelessness or by cruelty, and it is the one thing we make that outlives the mouth that made it.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)Read card

Q2075

DriveLiterature

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The sentence now travels alone, printed on posters and quoted at conferences. Baldwin wrote it in a 1962 essay for a newspaper book review, and he was talking about novelists — arguing that American writers of his generation flinched from looking at the country they lived in. He built the line as a hinge, turning 'everything' into 'nothing' and swapping the verbs. The promise inside it is deliberately small: facing something guarantees nothing, but nothing happens without it.

James Baldwin, 'As Much Truth As One Can Bear' (1962)Read card

Q2076

DriveLiterature

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.

Le Guin was 85, collecting a medal for a lifetime of American letters, and she spent her few minutes at the microphone attacking the industry that was honouring her. Publishers, she said, were selling books as commodities and writers were letting them. Then came this line, and the argument underneath it: every arrangement that feels permanent was once defended as the natural order, and every one of them was made by people who could be argued with.

Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards speech (2014)Read card

Q2077

DriveHistory

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Achebe offered this as a proverb he had inherited, not a line he had written, and he used it to explain why he became a novelist at all. He had grown up reading books in which Africans appeared as scenery in someone else's adventure. 'Things Fall Apart', published in 1958, is his answer: an Igbo village described from inside, its quarrels and courts and gods given the same weight a European novel gives its own.

Chinua Achebe, quoting a proverb, The Paris Review (1994)Read card

Q2078

StillnessLiterature

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Hurston wrote the novel in about seven weeks in Haiti, where she had gone to study folk religion and to recover from an affair she could not stay in. The book was dismissed by several of her contemporaries, went out of print, and she died in 1960 in a Florida welfare home, buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the novelist Alice Walker went looking for that grave, marked it, and the book came back.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)Read card

Q2079

StillnessLiterature

The only true voyage of discovery would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

The version that circulates online — 'not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes' — is a tidied-up shorthand. Proust's actual sentence keeps going, and the extension is the point: to see through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, and so to behold the hundred universes that each of them is. He wrote it in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, having spent his last years indoors, travelling almost nowhere.

Marcel Proust, The Captive (1923)Read card

Q2080

StillnessLiterature

Seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

These are the last lines of a book in which Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to an ageing Kublai Khan. The hell they are discussing is not somewhere else and not later — it is the one we make by living together, Polo says, and there are only two ways out. The first is to stop noticing it. The second is this one, which asks for constant attention and gives no comfort in return.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)Read card