Nadine Gordimer
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About the Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kiplingwas an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
Kipling’s works of fiction include the Jungle Book duologyand many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). His poems include “Mandalay” (1890), “Gunga Din” (1890), “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919), “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), and “If–” (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children’s books are classics; one critic noted “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”.
Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom’s most popular writers. Henry James said “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.” In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets’ Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.
Kipling’s subsequent reputation has changed with the political and social climate of the age. The contrasting views of him continued for much of the 20th century. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: “[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.”
Frequently Asked Questions
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- 1.
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
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- 2.
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
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- 3.
If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.
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- 4.
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
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- 5.
It’s clever, but is it Art?
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- 6.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
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- 7.
Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.
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- 8.
Heaven grant us patience with a man in love.
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- 9.
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
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- 10.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
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- 11.
If I were dammed of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, mother o’ mine o mother o’ mine.
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- 12.
God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.
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- 13.
Never look backwards or you’ll fall down the stairs.
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- 14.
A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
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- 15.
I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago… I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
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- 16.
Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.
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- 17.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
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- 18.
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
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- 19.
All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.
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- 20.
A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
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- 21.
Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
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- 22.
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
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- 23.
For the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one.
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- 24.
Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours.
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- 25.
San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
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- 26.
Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.
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- 27.
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
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- 28.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
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- 29.
If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
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- 30.
Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
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- 31.
He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
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- 32.
A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
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- 33.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
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- 34.
The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
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- 35.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
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- 36.
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
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- 37.
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.
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