“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
-Ernest Hemingway
What a day in Literary History, folks…and it’s Sunday, a lovely day to read! We have 3 birthdays: first there’s Chinese American writer, Maxine Hong Kingston who is 73 today; then there’s Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas born in 1914 and alas, sad and tragic American writer, Sylvia Plath born today in 1932 and ended her own life in 1963. All 3 writers were part of my reading repertoire…probably Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior) was more prevalent when I was a graduate student; Dylan Thomas was always around and Sylvia Plath during my teens along with Anne Sexton. (There was a mythological rivalry between the two.)
“Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.”-Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
“I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”–Dylan Thomas quoted in Dylan Thomas: The Biography by Paul Ferris, pg. 141
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”-Sylvia Plath
Happy Sunday Reading!
Ilene On Words 