Happy Birthday to my favourite author of all time: OSCAR WILDE!

Happy 160th birthday my dear Mr. Wilde. To whom I would have never learned the pleasure of indulging in temptation, never learned to love literature as I have loved yours. Your witticisms fulfill me and are the quaintest things. I learned to love  and embrace the arts in a way I had never done so before. I was Dorian and you Lord Henry. I can’t help what I’ve become because of you. I will never forget that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. Who am I now? I’ll never know, nor do I care. I shall finally live. Live beyond the pages of the words I’ve written. Thank you Mr. Wilde for a man as charming as Dorian Gray. There will never be another like him and he will always hold a part of me in eternal awe.

Happy Birthday Mary Wollstonecraft!!

Happy Birthday, Mary Wollstonecraft, born 27 April 1759, died 10 September 1797

Five Quotes

1. My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
2. Simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand, as both proceed from a love of truth.
3. It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust – ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.
4. The beginning is always today.
5. It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

Wollstonecraft  was an eighteenth-century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights. She wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children’s book. She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein.

Source Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

Words we got from Shakespeare:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/48657/20-words-we-owe-william-shakespeare

Phrases we got from Shakespeare:
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/8-common-phrases-we-owe-to-shakespeare#
http://writerswrite.co.za/international-day-of-the-book-23-april-william-shakespeares-450th-birthday

Video-song of words we got from Shakespeare

Birthdays

While scrolling through my Facebook, I ran across a post wish Hans Christian Andersen a happy birthday, so I thought, what a coincidence that an author who wrote The Snow Queen (among other fairy tales) that was recently made into a Disney film called Frozen, which my sister loves, shares a birthday with her. This got me curious and I ended up looking up who shares a birthday with me…it turns out Edward I does…that’s about the only person on the list I care about. I share a birthday with a king…seriously…but I am going to be forever jealous of the people who share a birthday with Queen Elizabeth I (September 7) or Oscar Wilde (October 16) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti (May 12)…and maybe Queen Victoria (May 24-not sure if she can be considered one of my favourite people, I loved the period, but her…maybe not so much)?