Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, Tess Gallagher was born on July 21, 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and MA from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke, and a MFA from the University of Iowa. Her first collection of poems, Instructions to the Double, won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for "best book of poetry published by a small press". In...

Today’s Quotation is care of Naomi Shihab Nye. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fe...

Today’s Quotation is care of Marcel Proust. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871 in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was one of France's most distinguished scientists. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was a well-educated woman who loved the great classic writers of the 17th century, especially Molière and Racine. Marcel's only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873. The hypersensitive Marcel suffered all his life from a number of ailments, especially asthma. Although he...

Today’s Quotation is care of Maurice Sendak. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) was born on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. A largely self-taught artist, Sendak illustrated over one hundred-fifty books during his sixty-year career.

The books he wrote as well as illustrated include Kenny’s Window, Very Far Away, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Nutshell Library (consisting of Chicken Soup with Rice, Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny, and Pierre...

Today’s Quotation is care of C. P. Cavafy. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in th...

Today’s Quotation is care of Rainer Maria Rilke. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

On December 4, 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. His parents placed him in military school with the desire that he become an officer—a position Rilke was not inclined to hold. With the help of his uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly gifted child, Rilke left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By the time he enrolled in Charles University in Prague in 1...

Today’s Quotation is care of James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

James Baldwin — the grandson of a slave — was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it. Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New...

Today’s Quotation is care of W. S. Merwin. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 2010, William Stanley Merwin had a career that spanned seven decades. A poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist, Merwin has become one of the most widely read and honored poets in America.  He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted, on Friday, March 15, 2019.

Born Sep...

Today’s Quotation is care of Henry James. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Henry James, (born April 15, 1843, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 28, 1916, London, Eng.), was a U.S.-British novelist. Born to a distinguished family, the brother of William James, he was privately educated. He traveled frequently to Europe from childhood on; after 1876 he lived primarily in England. His fundamental theme was to be the innocence and exuberance of the New World in conflict with the corruption and wisdom of t...

Today’s Quotation is care of Kay Ryan. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Born in California on September 21, 1945, Kay Ryan grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA. Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011; The Niagara River (2005); Say Uncle(2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), wh...