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; France
d. 10-17-1705

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

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

Mikhail Lermontov was a poet, novelist, and painter of the Romantic school.

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
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; Iran

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