“Embarrassment of riches” is a widely-used idiomatic expression that most people are familiar with. If you Google the phrase, you get millions of hits. At any given time, if you…
Category: Literature quotes
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
The great American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old. But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled…
“When you call me that, SMILE!”
When the groundbreaking Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister was first published on May 28, 1902, no one could have known that it would become so famous — or…
The day Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” made the earth move…HemingwayThe day Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” made the earth move…
On October 21, 1940, Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. It’s a classic war story about an American, Robert Jordan, who…
The bridge between the living and the dead . . .
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the second novel by the great American writer Thornton Wilder (1897- 1975). The first edition of the book was published by the Albert…
“Each man kills the thing he loves.” (Sometimes with a straight razor.)
On February 13, 1898, the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s now famous poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in London by publisher Leonard Smithers. Those initial copies of…
The “pearl of great price”: an allegory for people who don’t want to win the lottery
Every once in a while, there’s a news story about somebody who won millions in a lottery and ended up being miserable as a result. I remember one from a…