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.
cliche
The cliche is dead poetry.
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.
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.
writing age literature
The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
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.
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.
death war age
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.