Izaak Walton Quotes
English - Writer August 9, 1593 - December 15, 1683


Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.
Izaak Walton

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
Izaak Walton

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.
Izaak Walton

God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.
Izaak Walton

God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.
Izaak Walton

I have laid aside business, and gone a'fishing.
Izaak Walton

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.
Izaak Walton

Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
Izaak Walton

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.
Izaak Walton

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
Izaak Walton

In so doing, use him as though you loved him.
Izaak Walton

I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.
Izaak Walton

No man can lose what he never had.
Izaak Walton

That which is everybody's business is nobody's business.
Izaak Walton


P. L. Travers Quotes
Australian - Writer August 9, 1899 - April 23, 1996

I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
P. L. Travers

For me, there are no answers, only questions, and I am grateful that the questions go on and on. I don't look for an answer because I don't think there is one. I'm very glad to be the bearer of a question.
P. L. Travers

Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
P. L. Travers

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.
P. L. Travers

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.
P. L. Travers

I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.
P. L. Travers

'Friend Monkey' is really my favorite of all my books because the Hindu myth on which it is based is my favorite - the myth of the Monkey Lord who loved so much that he created chaos wherever he went.
P. L. Travers

My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.
P. L. Travers

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
P. L. Travers

I never wrote my books especially for children.
P. L. Travers

I was brought up Irish, where there was room for my own private world.
P. L. Travers

My father died when I was 7. I was his favorite child, and he was my beloved father. I brought him along with me all through my life. Every elderly man has a bit of my father in him for me.
P. L. Travers

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.
P. L. Travers

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
P. L. Travers

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.
P. L. Travers


Rachel Lambert Mellon Quotes
American - Celebrity August 9, 1910 - March 17, 2014

Wild flowers grow where they will.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

You know I'm weak on good looks.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

I was sitting alone in a grim mood - furious that the press attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me - from now on, all haircuts, etc., that are necessary and important for his campaign - please send the bills to me... It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

I'm nearly blind. I can hardly see. But I'm taking some herbs. Something quacky.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

As a child, I had lived many years in Southampton and sang in the choir of the Dune Church.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

I always design a landscape with fixed horizons whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a 20-foot-square plot.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

The sky is a free asset in design, and nothing unnecessary should be planted that takes away the sky.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

Nothing should be noticed.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

I don't know what I've done that has made people so interested in me, more than anyone else.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished.
Rachel Lambert Mellon

One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie. I was 23 then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them. Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.
Rachel Lambert Mellon


Tove Jansson Quotes
Finnish - Novelist August 9, 1914 - June 27, 2001

People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog's natural life - biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night... But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees!
Tove Jansson

When one's dead, one's dead... This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And still later on, there'll grow new trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that's so very sad?
Tove Jansson

Christmas always rustled. It rustled every time, mysteriously, with silver and gold paper, tissue paper and a rich abundance of shiny paper, decorating and hiding everything and giving a feeling of reckless extravagance.
Tove Jansson

You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.
Tove Jansson

Lie on the bridge and watch the water flowing past. Or run, or wade through the swamp in your red boots. Or roll yourself up and listen to the rain falling on the roof. It's very easy to enjoy yourself.
Tove Jansson

Dogs are mute and obedient, but they have watched us and know us and can smell how pitiful we are.
Tove Jansson

Those damn Moomins. I don't want to hear about them any more. I could vomit on the Moomintrolls.
Tove Jansson

One makes a trip by day, but by night, one sets out on a journey.
Tove Jansson

A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world because that's where people are shown what they could be if they wanted and what they'd like to be if they dared to and what they really are.
Tove Jansson

It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.'
Tove Jansson

Sometimes it's better to look at things than own them... owning means anxiety and lots of bags to carry around.
Tove Jansson

I wonder if the nursery and the chamber of horrors are as far apart as people think?
Tove Jansson

On the morning, Daddy and I get up at six o'clock because Christmas trees must be bought in the dark. We walk to the other end of town, as the big harbour is just the right setting for buying a Christmas tree. We spend hours choosing, looking at every branch suspiciously. It's always cold.
Tove Jansson

Mummy weighed sweets and nuts so that everyone would get exactly the same amount. During the year, everything is measured roughly, but at Christmas, it has to be absolutely fair. That's why it's such a strenuous time.
Tove Jansson

Nothing is as peaceful as when Christmas is over, when one has been forgiven for everything and can be normal again.
Tove Jansson

All men are chums who will never leave each other in the lurch. A chum doesn't forgive, he just forgets - women forgive everything but never forget. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.
Tove Jansson


Philip Larkin Quotes
English - Poet August 9, 1922 - December 2, 1985

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
Philip Larkin

You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
Philip Larkin

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
Philip Larkin

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
Philip Larkin

They say eyes clear with age.
Philip Larkin

In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
Philip Larkin

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
Philip Larkin

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
Philip Larkin

Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Philip Larkin