“That is one good thing about this world. . .there are always sure to be more springs.” ~ Anne Of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Here’s a quote photo to share with friends and family. I’ve also posted it on the LitQuotes Facebook page for easier sharing.
I was browsing through Amazon.com and was happily surprised to find The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature. You can be sure that I’ve added it to my wish list! It combines two of may favorite things, cooking and reading.
Wake up to a perfect breakfast with Mrs. Dalby’s Buttermilk Scones, courtesy of James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful and Ichabod’s Slapjacks, as featured in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There’s homey comfort food like Connie May’s Tomato Pie, created with and inspired by Connie May Fowler (Remembering Blue); Thanksgiving Spinach Casserole (Elizabeth Berg’s Open House); and Amish Chicken and Dumplings (Jodi Picoult’s Plain Truth) . . . Sample salads, breads, and such soul-warming soups as Nearly-a-Meal Potato Soup (Terry Kay’s Shadow Song); Mr. Casaubon’s Chicken Noodle Soup (George Eliot’s Middlemarch); and Mrs. Leibowitz’s Lentil-Vegetable Soup (Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes) . . . After relishing appetizers and entrees, there’s a dazzling array of desserts, including Carrot Pudding (Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol); Effie Belle’s Coconut Cake (Olive Ann Burns’s Cold Sassy Tree); and the kids will love C.S. Lewis’s Turkish Delight from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Sprinkled throughout with marvelous anecdotes about writers and writing, The Book Lover’s Cookbook is a culinary and literary delight, a browser’s cornucopia of reading pleasure, and a true inspiration in the kitchen.
Jo’s Best Omelette . . . Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
No Dieter’s Delight Chicken Neapolitan . . . Thinner by Stephen King
Extra-Special Rhubarb Pie . . . The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas
Grand Feast Crab Meat Casserole . . . At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon
Persian Cucumber and Yogurt . . . House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
Tamales . . . Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Bev’s No-Fuss Crab Cakes . . . Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell
Macaroni and Cheese . . . The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Veteran Split Pea Soup . . . The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Alternative Carrot-Raisin-Pineapple Salad . . . Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
Summer’s Day Cucumber-Tomato Sandwiches . . . Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
Refreshing Black Cows . . . The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
Dump Punch . . . Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Not Violet, But Blueberry Pie . . . Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Innocent Sweet Bread . . . The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Daddy’s Rich Chocolate Cake . . . Fatherhood by Bill Cosby
“I do hate singing before that sort of audience. It is like giving them your soul to look at, and you don’t want them to see it. It seems indecent. To my mind, music is the most REVEALING thing in the world.” ~ The Rosary by Florence L. Barclay
For his part, every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy, and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldly blessing. ~ Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
At a single strain of music, the scent of a flower, or even one glimpse of a path of moonlight lying fair upon a Summer sea, the barriers crumble and fall. Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust. ~ Old Rose and Silver by Myrtle Reed
“Your voice and music are the same to me.” ~ The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens
She made up her mind to tell them to play loud–there was a lot of music in a cornet, if the man would only put his soul into it. ~ The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.” ~ The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
“And now, Doctor, we’ve done our work, so it’s time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums.” ~ The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
see all of the music quotes from literature
Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2 in 1805. He died on August 4, 1875. His fairy tales, such as The Little Mermaid and The Little Match Girl, have inspired movies, plays and ballets.
Here are five quick facts about the author that you may not know:
1 – He was born in Odense, Denmark. His father was a shoemaker and his mother worked as a washerwoman.
2 – Andersen’s father set the stage for his son’s love of literature by reading him Arabian Nights.
3 – Hans Christian Anderson was not lucky in love. Jenny Lind, the opera singer, was the most famous of his unrequited loves.
4 – In the spring of 1872, Andersen fell out of his bed and was injured. He never fully recovered. Soon after he started to have signs of liver cancer. He died on August 4, 1875 in a house near Copenhagen.
5 – An early fairy tale by Andersen called The Tallow Candle was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle who did not feel appreciated. Its existence was unknown for close to two centuries.
April Fools Day seems like an appropriate time to talk about one of the early successes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s career, J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.
The short story is a work of fiction. However it’s based on a true story, the maritime mystery of the Mary Celeste. In 1872 the Mary Celeste was spotted by the crew of the British brigantine Dei Gratia. The Mary Celeste seemed to be in trouble. Some of her sails were missing while others flapped uselessly in the wind. Most alarming of all was the fact that there was no one at the wheel!
The Mary Celeste was boarded and found to be relatively undamaged. The cargo was intact. There was plenty of food and water aboard. However there was no sign of the crew. Not a soul was on board. To this day no one knows what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste.
J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement was published anonymously. In it, Conan Doyle wrote about an abandoned vessel named the Marie Celeste. The story tells how the ship was commandeered and sailed to Africa. Later the passengers and crew were murdered.
The problem was that the story was so vivid that some people mistook it for an article. They thought they were reading a piece of investigative journalism. It caused quite an uproar.
Other people reading the tale understood that it was a work of fiction. However it drew a lot of attention when hundreds of readers thought that they recognized the writing style of the anonymous author. They suspected that the author was none other than Robert Louis Stevenson.
Going on an Easter egg hunt tomorrow? I hope you have wonderful weather.
The whole earth was brimming sunshine that morning. She tripped along, the clear sky pouring liquid blue into her soul. ~ Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Here’s a quote photo to share with friends and family. I’ve also posted it on the LitQuotes Facebook page for easier sharing.
Out of all the t-shirts, mugs, buttons, magnets, cards and other assorted merchandise in the LitQuotes gift shop, what’s the single most popular item? Let me rephrase that. What’s by FAR the most popular item at the gift shop? It’s this Sherlock Holmes themed license plate frame . . .
Let me know if you can think of any other phrases you’d like to see on license plate frames at the LitQuotes gift shop.
So much of life is about perspective isn’t it? You think you’re having a bad day and then you narrowly avoid a car accident. It turns out to be a very, very lucky day.
You’re surprised to hear about a friend’s divorce. You always thought they were so happy. Nope. That was just how it looked from the outside.
You look out the window and see a snowy, cold afternoon. Your child looks out the window and sees their world transformed into a beautiful, white fantasy.
Perspective. It’s the difference between living your life and just getting through your life.
One never can tell from the sidewalk just what the view is to some one on the inside, looking out. ~ Knocking the Neighbors by George Ade
Come what may, I am bound to think that all things are ordered for the best; though when the good is a furlong off, and we with our beetle eyes can only see three inches, it takes some confidence in general principles to pull us through. ~ The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” ~ Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
“I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain,” he remarked. “If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence.” ~ The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. ~ The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
“If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.” ~ You Never Can Tell by George Bernard Shaw
London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. ~ Howards End by E. M. Forster
All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage. ~ The Five Orange Pips by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Here’s my favorite love quote from the collection. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild! ~ The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy