Author, Poet & Novelist Posters & Prints: “Len...-Les...-”
for the literature, language arts and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and scholars.

Anne “Ninon” de l'Enclos, (Ninon de Lenclos),
b. 11-10-1620; Paris, France
d. 10-17-1705; Paris

Ninon de l'Enclos, a great beauty who devoted her life to pleasure, was also a patron of literature as well as an author.

FYI - She left a portion of her estate to a 9 year old son of her accountant; he became known as Voltaire.

Ninon de Lenclos quotes ~
• “Every action we take, everything we do, is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be.”
• “The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.”
• “The joy of the mind is the measure of its strength.”
• “Today a new sun rises for me; everything lives, everything is animated, everything seems to speak to me of my passion, everything invites me to cherish it.”
• “The resistance of a woman to a man’s advances is not always a sign of virtue. Sometimes it’s just a sign of experience.”
• “Old age is a woman's hell.”

• Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos The Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century
• Famous Hussies of History: Stories of the Super-Women

Madeleine L'Engle
b. 11-29-1918; NYC
d. 9-6-2007; Connecticut

Madeleine L'Engle is best remembered for her Young Adult fiction that includes A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. L'Engle, interested in modern science, explored tesseracts, mitochondrial DNA and organ regeneration.

Madeleine L'Engle quotes ~
• “Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.”
• “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
• “Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.”
• “We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.”
• “We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.”
• “I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.”
• “I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost on the rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe ‘is as good as a burnt out candle.’”
• “Love isn't how you feel, it's what you do.” A Ring of Endless Light

Aldo Leopold
b. 1-11-1887; Burlington, Iowa
d. 4-21-1948; Baraboo, Wisconsin

Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac is one of the most influential nature books.

Aldo Leopold quotes ~
• “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching – even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
• “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
• “The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.”
• “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”
• “I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
• “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
• “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
• “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

• “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
• “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
• “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
• “The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum,
the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on....
A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.”

Mikhail Lermontov
b. 10-15-1814; Moscow, Russia
d. 7-27-1841

Mikhail Lermontov was a poet, novelist, and painter of the Romantic school. Lermontov is considered of the same rank as Pushkin; his prose work foreshadows the Russian psychological novels of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoevsky.

Mikhail Lermontov quotes ~
• “Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.”
• “O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!”

• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov

Gaston Leroux
b. 5-6-1868; Paris, France
d. 4-15-1927

Gaston Leroux, a journalist and author of detective fiction, is best known for his Phantom of the Opera which was adapted for a silent film in 1925 and a musical in 1986.

Gaston Leroux quotes ~
• “If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me.”
• “All I wanted was to be loved for myself.”

Doris Lessing
b. 10-22-1919; Kemanshah, Iran
d. 11-17-2013; London

Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Doris Lessing quotes ~
• “A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.”
• “It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”
• “I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”
• “Literature is analysis after the event.”
• “If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”
• “That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
• “With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.”

• The Golden Notebook