Literary Birthday – 29 January – Germaine Greer

Happy Birthday, Germaine Greer, born 29 January 1939.

Seven Germaine Greer Quotes

1. A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
2. Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
3. Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.
4. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
5. Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.
6. There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
7. Act quickly, think slowly.

Germaine Greer is an Australian academic, author, and journalist. Her book Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970, turning her into a household name and bringing her both adulation and opposition. She is also the author of many other books including Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility; The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause; Shakespeare’s Wife. She is Professor Emerita of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

Source for Image: Helen Morgan, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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