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
boredom bores oneself
Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
butterfly people leisure
We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
business thinking words-of-wisdom
Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.
anniversary wedding husband
In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.
morning attitude writing
It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
together helping harmony
One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.
quality bad-qualities ridiculous
We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.
cliche
The cliche is dead poetry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
time acquisition imitation
Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.