So many books; so little time

Books to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, for better or worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, til' death do us part. Books to touch your heart.

[mrstumble-blog]

Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life… in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked.

Fay Weldon (via mrstumble-blog)

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Romantic Outlaws

Mary Shelley on Mary Wollstonecraft:

‘The memory of my Mother has always been the pride and delight of my life and the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness...I have enjoyed.  Her greatness of soul (has) perpetually reminded me that I ought to degenerate as little as I could from those from whom I derived my being.’

‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once perhaps in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud. Her genius was undeniable.  She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and the oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows.  Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens.  She was one whom all loved who had ever seen her.  Many years are passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic veneration.’

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Romantic Outlaws

‘The arrival of Byron and his entourage was always a spectacular event, but especially so in a sleepy little town like Pisa.  On 1 November, the carts rolled down the Lung ‘Arno, piled high with supplies, including his enormous bed with the Byron coat of arms carved in the headboard.  Then came the Flemish mare, led by a special groom; the goats and donkey trotted along behind; the dogs leapt and barked, straining on their leashes; the geese hissed and shook their feathers; the rest of the menagerie howled in their crates.  His lordship arrived last, shuttere dinside his Napoleonic carriage, away from the eyes of the curious.’

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[18thcenturylove]

Just finished this book today. Absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend.

“Saying it’s engrossing is almost an understatement–I don’t remember ever finding a biography so hard to put down.”

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Liszt at the Piano

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Byron Life and Legend

‘The cult of Byron went far beyond the literary to encompass musicians and artists.  It influenced nineteenth-century portraiture and dress, attitudes to nature, scenery and travel, views of morality an human relations, becoming in itself almost a way of life.  The extent of Byron worship can be glimpsed in Josef Danhauser’s painting of 1840 Liszt at the Piano showing seven European Romantics at the shrine of Beethoven an Byron, who is represented by the exquisite portrait drawing made by George Harlow in the year of his engagement to Annabella Milbanke.  In the group of Byronists, besides the writers Alexandra Dumas and George Sand, are the celebrated violinist Paganini and compsers Rossini, Berlioz and Liszt himself with mistress Maria d‘Agoult  sitting at this feet.’

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Byron Life and Legend

‘One of the people in the crowd who caught a glimpse of Byron passing through Oxford Street was the ruralist poet John Clare, on a rare visit to London.  Byron’s near contemporary, though from a very different milieu, he was already a passionate admirer. A young girl standing beside him in the crowd ‘gave a deep sigh and utter poor Lord Byron’. Clare’s later account invests the episode with an incandescent significance: 

‘I looked up in the young girl’s face it was dark and beautiful and I could almost feel in love with her for the sigh she had utterd for the poet....the Reverend the Moral and fastidious may say what they please about Lord Byrons fame and damn it as they list - he has gained the path of its eterni(t)y without them and lives above the blight of their mildewing censure to do him damage - the common people felt his merits an his power and the common people of a country are the best feelings of a prophecy of futurity.’

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Don't look at him, he is dangerous to look at.

English noblewoman in Rome, warning her daughter about Byron

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‘One of the great literary biographies of our time’: Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday

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Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!

Fay Weldon

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There was no burden. There was only the diamond-blue earth gardened in a wilderness of space.

Weight by Jeanette Winterson

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The free man never thinks of escape. In the beginning there was nothing. Not even space and time. You could have thrown the universe at me and I would have caught it in one hand. There was no universe. It was easy to bear.

Weight by Jeanette Winterson

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Kafka by Nicholas Murray

In a wonderful passage about the grandeur of reading he writes:

'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.  If the book we are readong doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?.....we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide.  A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us'.