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authors, books, dead, do they sense it, favourite books, life, pablo neruda, quote by diane setterfield, soul stirring, spanish english poetry, stories, these dead writers, when their books are read?, when their books are read? does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? i do hope so, writing
What a beautiful quote, right? It makes me wonder…
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Pablo Neruda’s love poetry in both Spanish and English. He had such a way with words! So beautiful…the metaphors and imagery is exquisite. He’s long gone and that makes me sad. As I read, I sometimes imagine a young man, hopelessly in love, stumbling down the streets of Madrid, searching for his beloved. It could be anyone. I’m glad that his words still live on, even though he does not.
Who is your favourite dead writer? Who stirs in their death as you flicker through the pages of their novels?
– Ermisenda Alvarez
Ermilia 
Chaucer is definitely my favourite writer. On paper, he may have died in 1400, but stays alive to this day even so.
That’s the best kind of immortality for a person I think. At least, I hope that my name lives on through my words. 🙂
It doesn’t make much sense unless you really know me, but I like to believe that it is the stirrings from words read tomorrow, which cause me to write them today.
Beautifully said. 🙂
I am mourning the loss of Stieg Larssen, author of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Girl who Played with Fire & the Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Perhaps it is because his death was so sudden & unexpected. Perhaps it is because there is a partially written manuscript for a 4th book, and possible outlines for a total of 10 books in the Millenium series. To lose an author in the middle of his career is so sad. Although there are many long dead authors whose work I enjoy, I feel a more immediate sense of loss for words unwritten by an author I respected greatly. On a more positive note, the field trip my AP English class took to the Hemingway Archives at the JFK Museum back in high school was an amazing experience. To peruse the drafts of this writer, to see his typos, word changes & other edits was just really, really cool.
Later~xx
Hey Xandra! I went to the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam and to see the original diary was earth-shattering. There were edits and strike-throughs. There were also plenty of pages with other notes or stories written on them. I wonder how many stories Anne could have shared if she had been given the chance. At least she shared a particularly poignant one, her diary. I was also sad that Stieg Larsson passed. He wrote some great books. Thanks for sharing!
My favorite dead writer is Robert A. Heinlein. I was an precocious reader, one of my earliest memories of school was my first grade teacher catching me with a paperback copy of “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” tucked inside the primer where the other kids were working on “see Dick run.” She was furious that I would pretend I was reading such an advanced book, so I read a paragraph. She accused me of having memorized that bit, and turned to a different page where I read a paragraph of her choice. there was some consternation, and I was eventually paddled “for being smart.”
I finally escaped that woman, and continued to read, by fourth grade I was reading “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” My poor mother finally got me to memorize the multiplication tables by rationing another of my favorites, Piers Anthony’s “Sos the Rope.”