Gerald Brenan
Gerald Brenan
Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE was a British writer and Hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
happy-life giving generosity
As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.
english-writer talker whom
Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.
age death middle sudden wars
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death does.
english-writer means
Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.
arms cannot english-writer fall holding love offensive wish
If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands. One cannot love while holding offensive arms.
broken-heart two people
Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.
race literature language
The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
class people special
Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.
sympathy sorry people
The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.
grief missing absence
We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.
death hurt should
We should all live as if we were never going to die, for it is the deaths of our friends that hurt us, not our own.
cliche
The cliche is dead poetry.
writing somewhere-else pages
When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.
writing age literature
The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.