memoirists

"... ... made the move, relocating to ... the . He formally entered the city in February 1865 ... Two years after this Janet arrived from Alexandria, Egypt, where she had been living with her husband Henry Ross, for the previous five years. Her trip to was planned as a short holiday. She booked a berth on a run-down steamer that took a route out from Alexandria across the Mediterranean to the southern Italian port of . From there she went by carriage northwards up the peninsula, through beautiful countryside with hills of old knotted olive trees and swathes of perfumed lavender, beneath a brilliant blue sky. Her plan was to arrive in Florence and stay for a fortnight as the guest of an old family friend and relative by marriage, , the British Ambassador to Italy. She had read about Florence, its treasures and its history. She was familiar with its great writers, Dante and Boccaccio, the unsurpassed beauty created by its painters, and the understated order achieved by its architects. She had heard stories of the proud patrician families with their age-old feuds and allegiances — names like , and — and she knew something of the story of Savonarola and how he was burnt at the stake in the . This was her opportunity to witness for herself the history that till now she had only read about in books."

"How many of the travelers who visit now remember that she is one of the most ancient cities of Italy, and was famous when Rome was but a hamlet? They can see the ancient walls, but can they conceive that in the long history of the community settled between the rivers and the grey lines of buildings are but of yesterday? They may perhaps remember that a palace of Hadrian, one of the greatest or Roman Emperors, stood where the now stands; that temples to Apollo and to covered the sites of the churches of and in Borgo; that at the foot of the Via S. Maria grave priestesses of sang hymns in honour their goddess, who ripened the golden corn which covered the plains from the Monte Pisano to the coast; and that in a temple which stood in the Piazza S. Andrea love-sick young men and maidens presented their offerings at the shrine of Venus and made their vows to the goddess they evoked. But can they realize that in those far-off days, before our Christian era began, Pisa was a city so old that its beginnings were even then half-concealed, half-concealed, half-disclosed, in legends of her origin?"

"The great event of my life was my birthday, when I was allowed to dine downstairs, and to invite my particular friends. My fifth I well remember, for Thackeray played a trick on the "young revolutionist," as he afterwards called me, because I was born on the . My guests were , , , Bayley, and Thackeray, who gave me an oyster, declaring that it was like cabinet pudding. But I turned the tables on him, for I liked it, and insisted, as queen of the day, on having two more of his. I still possess a sketch he made for the of ' while I was sitting on his knee."

"Mrs. Ross laid in our wood, wine and servants for us, and they are excellent. She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed, and put together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain stove in the vast central hall. She is a wonderful woman, and we don't quite see how or when we should have gotten under way without her."

"Janet Ross was one of those -like dragons for whom the word “formidable” was practically invented. Born in London in 1842, she spent the last six decades of her life — from 1867 until her death in 1927 — as an increasingly commanding personage in the Anglo-Tuscan colony around , where she was known (and feared) as Aunt Janet. freely acknowledges near the beginning of “Queen Bee of Tuscany” that Ross “had her limitations. Though intelligent and learned, especially for an autodidact, she was by no means brilliant. She had little imagination or inner life, and she made no towering contribution to humanity.” Thus the biographer throws down his own gauntlet: Why, then, are we reading about her? Downing, a co-editor of , and a walking Who’s Who of the , provides an answer in the form of It’s Who She Knew. And Aunt Granite (as the younger generation called her) knew everybody — or at least everybody who passed through Florence, which in Downing’s telling comes to the same thing. An endless procession of now forgotten artists and writers and social somebodies made their way to her door. Major figures do show up. In 1887, Henry James pays her a three-day visit, although “nowhere in her writings,” Downing acknowledges, somewhat sheepishly, “does she so much as mention James.”"

"Cabbage (Red) ' alla Fiamminga.' Remove the outer leaves of a and cut it in pieces. Put it into boiling water for fifteen minutes, then dry, and place it in a sauce-pan with four ounces of , a chopped-up onion, a , two s, and a little salt and pepper. Boil slowly for about half an hour, stirring it often. When cooked, take out the bay leaf, add a little butter and serve quickly."

"Of 's seven children, was perhaps the handsomest and most gifted; the extraordinary vigour of her mind and body was almost overpowering, but it stood her in good stead during a long and not over-prosperous life, and was tempered by an excellent judgment and a very kind heart. No one ever appealed to her in vain; and in her old age children flocked round her with delight to hear "" or one of , so well and graphically told."

"From the very first possessed a correct and vigorous style, and a nice sense of language, which were hereditary rather than implanted, and to these qualities was added a delightful strain of humour, shedding a current or original thought all through her writings. That her unusual gifts should have been so early developed is hardly surprising with one of her sympathetic temperament when we remember the throng of remarkable men and women who frequented the Austins' house. The Mills, the s, the s, the Carlyles, the s, Sydney Smith, , , Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Jeffrey, were among the most intimate friends of her parents, and 'Toodie,' as they called her, was a universal favourite with them. Once, staying at a friend's house, and hearing their little girl rebuked for asking questions, she said: ' My mamma never says "I don't know" of "Don't ask questions." '"

"... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children."

"You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; was famous for its sausage shop. The set the tone for , and Charlemont Street offered a display of s, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance."

"Trevor is not a benign . There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, s, and s. In this volume, some tame s have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of s to get himself a driver and a free meal."

"... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish s and s, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time."

"Trevor won many honors, including the of the for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Prize for literature and the for fiction in 1976; and the three times: in 1978 for “,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “.” The latter was made into a 1999 film starring ."

"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."

"I...was very different from the raw Irish lads who composed the greater part of the subalterns. One of them, of the name of George Eld Derby, a youth of about my own age, thus very gravely addressed the mess one evening after dinner: "By Jasus, gentlemen, I am conscious you must have the meanest opinion of my courage. Here have I been no less than six weeks with the regiment, and the divil of a duel have I fought yet. Now, Captain Craigie, you are the senior Captain of the regiment, and if you plase I will begin with you first; so name your time and place." Now, very many of these subaltern officers were of the stamp of my friend Mr. Derby. So a man could not be too guarded in his conduct with such heroes."

"A fat, fair and fifty card-playing resident of the Crescent."

"I love words, I really love the pleasure and consolation you get from words. Words can be nourishing or medicinal or at their worst, poisonous."

"my own memoir is a history of Jamaica; it’s my attempt to show that history happens to real people; how history affects ordinary people. (2013)"

"Lorna Goodison's new collection is a triumph of fusions: of the naive wide-eyed delight of her younger poems with their claiming pride of naming everything that is melodiously Jamaican, to a tougher nostalgia that now looks at those things with a benign, unboastful authority. This is what the young Goodison fought for - the confidence of claiming the familiar, of trans-figuring it by the fury of her humility. And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvelous poems restore? Joy."

"It's terrific that there are these women writers, Caribbean writers, emerging. They're emerging the same way that the men emerged. It's just their time, nobody can stop it. They are the ones that have to tell the half that has never been told, and they will tell it."

"I think a lot of my poems have been trying to make these gestures, you know, to say 'I'm a human being, and I have some control ... very limited, but some control over myself as a human being.' (2007)"

"I see myself in a tradition of praise singers. (2004, in Writing across worlds)"

"My particular role, as I see it, is to accurately represent my people. I have this real concern about how sometimes Jamaicans, and Caribbean people, are represented. And in my own writing, I want to tell their stories, but I want to do it in such a way that I think accurately portrays them. That’s the only ambition I really have. And if I do that, then I’ve fulfilled my job as a writer. (2013)"

"Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being. (2013)"

"You know, the Emily Dickinson litmus test: if I read a poem and I feel so cold as if no fire will ever warm me, or if I feel physically as if I'm losing the top of my head? Most poems can't pass that test, but you read something like 'Ode to a Nightingale', and you do lose the top of your head! Nowadays people seem to want this absolute control over poetry, a kind of domination. I'm not interested in that kind of poetry. I appreciate artistry and virtuosity, but I love it when you just back away from a poem, and think, 'Jesus! Where did that come from?' When you have to admit you have no idea how it got in there. (2007)"

"once I started reading, I was taken with the idea of what could happen to you once you read something. I don’t actually remember thinking that I wanted to be a writer, but I remember thinking I wanted to be a part of this world where people put down thoughts on paper, and when you read it back you could feel all of the emotions: you could be sad, you could be happy, you could be repulsed—all of those things. And I knew I wanted to be a part of that world. (2013)"

"...I never anywhere saw my own point of view. Although it wasn't a conscious effort, I think in the end I needed to read those poems; that's why I wrote them. So, Tamarind Season was just a need to cry out about a lot of things about myself, about other women, about Jamaica, about the world in my own small way."

"I believe I started to write because I wanted to read what I was writing. When I was growing up there were no images of me in the literature I read. I didn't see myself or people like me in any of the literature of my youth."

"Few writers are as attuned as Goodison to the heartache and triumphs of Jamaicans, especially Jamaican women. . . . Fewer writers still tell us so much about what it means to be human."

"The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech. "Her name is Doris," she said to her husband, David."

"When all of this is over, I want to have done something that I really think means something to people: something that feeds them in some way, and I'm trying to feed the work in the hope that it can nourish people. (2007)"

"...I didn't think you should approach what your vocation is in any faint-hearted way... or as Rasta would say 'with a weak heart'. So, I wanted to write strong poems as good as the men, but about women's business."

"People should realize that there is not a finite amount of opportunities for writers or for artists, you know. I think if you're good, you're good. I myself have always had the attitude that I just do my work, and I do what I'm doing, and if I am recognized, good. But I'm perfectly willing to just go about my life and if some big things happen, that's wonderful, and if they don't, I am still going to be Lorna Goodison. I will continue to just be myself."

"I just love what's happening now; it's like there's a big tapestry and everybody has a corner because everybody has a story to tell."

"I think that's what real poetry is...there are all these levels...you can write about what you really feel...You get borrowed and it doesn't have very much to do with you. That's why I think real poetry or the inspiration to write real poetry is a divine thing; it is completely out of your hands. You just happen to be standing there and it passes through you."

"Lorna Goodison is an artist as well as a poet. The keeps of her observation, her certain demarcation of shapes, her canny sense of physical and sociological textures are undoubtedly related to that.... The sensibility in Tamarind Season is a woman's...this is the important other half, the perspicacity missing from the current record of the Caribbean."

"She is solidly located in the trinity of Caribbean writing. It is now, officially, Walcott, Braithwaite and Goodison."

"We were willing to go anywhere, or to follow anyone who would lead us. We were anxious to flee, fight, or fortify. I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized. The whole thing seemed to be tottering and trembling."

"Well, on the fatal morning... the sun rose clear and cloudless, the heavens seemed made of brass, and the earth of iron, and as the sun began to mount towards the zenith, everything became quiet, and no sound was heard save a peckerwood on a neighboring tree, tapping on its old trunk, trying to find a worm for his dinner. We all knew it was but the dead calm that precedes the storm."

"Farewell, old fellow! We privates loved you because you made us love ourselves."

"He would have a man shot at the drop of a hat, and drop it himself."

"War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed... called the conscript act. ... From this time on till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. ... All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy."

"A law was made... allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of "rich man's war, poor man's fight." The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and the pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript."

"America has no north, no south, no east, no west; the sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north and a south. ... We are one and undivided."

"He was loved, respected, admired; yea, almost worshipped, by his troops. I do not believe there was a soldier in his army but would gladly have died for him. With him everything was his soldiers, and the newspapers, criticizing him at the time, said, "He would feed his soldiers if the country starved.""

"I always shot at privates. It was they that did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill or wound a private, why, my chances were so much the better. I always looked upon officers as harmless personages."

"Women lead the peace movement. They’ve definitely got positions of leadership there."

"we have a macho, male society which is not only engaged militarily but is dominated by male tradition religiously and sociologically...Women need to be represented in politics, in lobbying, need to try to achieve legislation. We need to get more women into politics and into the Knesset."

"If we really can advance towards peace, I see this as a springboard for other changes. Peace and war are irreversible, but other things are less absolute. Since we don’t have a constitution, if there is a change in the law it can be undone later. So it wouldn’t bother me to go along on some concessions and then in better times, say, try and change them. If there is peace, a lot of wrongs will be corrected."

"I have no doubt that once peace is attained in the Middle East, the struggle for the advancement of women and their equality will assume a high priority in our society, and become a subject of cooperation among women in the whole region."