Do you remember?

“You are speaking…as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing…what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure.” – C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

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“We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors’. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are.” – Carlos Ruis Zafon, Spanish writer

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“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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Outstanding biographies and autobiographies: HERE
  Stories about memories: HERE
  Writing about your memories: HERE
  Picture books for writers: HERE

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Laden, Nina. Once Upon a Memory. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2013.
Sis, Peter. Tibet: Through the Red Box. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.
Sydor, Colleen. Timmerman Was Here. Toronto : Tundra Books, 2009.

 “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” – Maya Angelou

“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at.” – Jesse Owens

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – President Barack Obama

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.” – Maya Angelou

“The time is always right to do what is right.”  – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Click HERE for stories about African Americans.

Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel, 1994.
Fandel, Jennifer. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Great Civil Rights Leader. Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2007.
Hughes, Langston. My People. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2009.
Hughes, Langston. The Negro Speaks of Rivers. New York: Jump at the Sun, 2009.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. I Have a Dream. New York : Schwartz & Wade Books, 2012.
Rappaport, Doreen. Martin’s Big Words: the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children, 2001.
Shange, Ntozake. Coretta Scott. New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2009.

Enjoy life to the fullest!

“A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy.” – Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philospher

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” – Emily Dickinson, American poet

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein, German-born physicist

Click HERE  and HERE   and HERE.

Just for today,…

write a poem!

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Click HERE to find directions.

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“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau, French poet

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T.S. Eliot, American poet

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” – W.H. Auden, Anglo-American poet

Just for today,…

meet legendary characters!

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Click HERE!

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“My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Pabst, had done her master’s thesis on Tolkien. She showed me how the trilogy was patterned after Norse mythology. She was also the first person to encourage me to submit stories for publication. The idea of writing a fantasy based on myths never left me, and many years later, this would lead me to write Percy Jackson.” – Rick Riordan

“Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.” – Karen Armstrong, British writer

“After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“ And you must tell the child the legends I told you–as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must tell of those not of the earth who live forever in the hearts of the people…” – Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Love cannot live where there is no trust.” – Edith Hamilton, Mythology