Rudyard Kipling

Source: Explore Haileybury

Rudyard Kipling
Born: 30 December, 1865 - Bombay, India
Died: 18 January, 1936 - London England



poet
short story writer
journalist
war correspondent - Boer War, South Africa
Nobel Prize winner - 1907



If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
- If (1896)


If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
-  Epitaphs of War - Common Form (1914-18)


God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
- Recessional (1897)
- Originally published in the Times of London for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee


I keep six honest serving-men: 
(They taught me all I knew) 
Their names are What and Where and When 
And How and Why and Who.
- Just So Stories - The Elephant's Child (1902)

T.S. Eliot...

T.S. Eliot
Born: September 26th, 1888 - Missouri, U.S.
Died; January 4th, 1965 - London, U.K.

He became a British citizen in 1927

Nobel Prize in Literature - 1948

poet
essayist
playwright


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
+
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
+
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- The Hollow Men


A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
+
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
- The Waste Land


Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take,
towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.
- Four Quartets

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity, 
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. 
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: 
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
- Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats


The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
- Murder in the Cathedral

William Faulkner...

William Faulkner
Born: September 25th, 1897 - Mississippi, U.S.
Died: July 6th, 1962 - Mississippi, U.S.


novelist
short story writer
playwright
poet
essayist


Nobel Prize for Literature 1949
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1955, 1963



Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
+
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
- The Sound and the Fury


I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
- As I Lay Dying

She was the captain of her soul...
- Light in August

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
- A Fable

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief
- The Wild Palms

...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
- Intruder in the Dust

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
- Absalom, Absalom!

William Golding...

William Golding
Born: September 19th, 1911 - Newquay, U.K.
Died: June 19th, 1993 - Perranarwarthal, U.K.
Nobel Prize for Literature 1983


novelist



Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
+
The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. 
- Lord of the Flies


I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
- The Spire

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
- Darkness Visible

Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
- A Moving Target

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
- Free Fall

Count Maurice...

Count Maurice Maeterlinck
Born: 29th August 1862 - Ghent, Belgium
Died: 6th May 1949 - Nice, France


poet
playwright
essayist
Nobel Prize winner in Literature - 1911


When we lose someone we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ...
- The Treasure of the Humble 

...signs of a life that we cannot explain are everywhere, vibrating by the side of the life of every day.
- The Treasure of the Humble