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
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.
mother memories invention
A bad memory is the mother of invention.
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.
happy country art
One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom....
death war age
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.
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.
artist people world
Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for.
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.
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.
anniversary wedding husband
In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.
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.