hans christian andersen quote at sfo terminal

This was the generation of Dickens and that was a surprise for me. I didn't expect this.Īndersen was born in 1805 and died in 1875. One finds oneself having great sympathy for him (and for some of his friends too, for putting up with him.) He definitely felt great love and friendship which was largerly returned, another aspect of his genius. Overall however the portrait presented is very rare and memorable.

(For example, he wouldn't travel on a ship or boat unless he had a rope with him so he could escape a burning ship.) In dealing with his death from liver cancer, she seems to not understand that the physical symptoms can present themselves long before an actual diagnosis would have been made. At one point the author says of his toothaches they were 'comic' (perhaps she meant that he used it comically.) Instead to me, it read as if he was in near constant pain, if only from his teeth, and fears. All of his teeth had been pulled by the time he died and he seems to have complained of incessant toothaches. There's evidence of Marfan syndrome as well as OCD. However, and to many this may seem a quible, she is curiously insensitive to his physical ailments. Wullschlager writes with great sensitivity of his passions, creativity and foibles. Very rude of him to be dead because I suspect we would have a lot to chat about and, unlike Dickens, I would always write back.

He developed intense crushes that were never returned with the same intensity, often liked two people at the same time, yearned for companionship over sex, loved to stoke speculation about his infatuations while also denying that he liked anyone, relished the posture of the hopeless lover and was inevitably crushed when the objects of his affection chose to marry respectable middle-class men instead of quirky writers. He held that imagination was more important than formal education, could be very aggressive in defense of imaginative literature and would burst into tears at the slightest criticism. He memorized whole scenes from Shakespeare and recited them to himself as he walked the snowy streets of his hometown. (If he were on twitter, people would accuse us of stealing each other’s tweets). He flirted with girls by telling them he was a faerie changeling who would one day own a castle. He had an intense sympathy for the Jewish people, who were still being persecuted in early nineteenth-century Denmark. Andersen was convinced from a young age that he had a God-given vocation to write fantasy stories. These days I realize that my personality is much closer to that of Carroll or Andersen-both of them writers of fairy-tales, both foppish and effeminate, both more at ease around women than men, both sexually timid bachelors who never dated and died virgins. Growing up I wanted to be Charles Dickens, and I suspect that Andersen did, as well-he wrote Dickens passionate letters to which Dickens eventually stopped responding and famously stayed at his house for five weeks, weeping on the front lawn because he was so overcome with emotion. There’s joy in discovering someone else who gets you, a literary icon who harbored the same aspirations and attained success in his craft despite being dreamy, eccentric and socially awkward. The author wrote a brief sketch of Andersen’s life and personality which suggested that we were kindred souls separated by time, and Jackie Wullschlager’s biography, The Life of a Storyteller, cements this conviction.

(The Alice books were my favorite books growing up). Last summer I read a book about famous writers in history who were likely autistic-among them Emily Dickinson, Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, for whom I have an intense affinity. As we follow in his footsteps from Golden Age Copenhagen to the princely courts of Germany and the villas of southern Italy, Andersen becomes a figure every bit as fascinating as a character from one of his stories-a gawky, self-pitying, and desperate man, but also one of the most gifted storytellers the world has ever known. Although others before him had collected and retold folk stories and fairy tales, Andersen was the first to create the stories himself, instilling a previously stilted genre with new humor, wisdom, and pathos.ĭrawing on letters, diaries, and other original sources (many never before translated from the Danish), Wullschlager shows in this compelling, extensively researched biography how Andersen's writings-darker and more diverse than previously recognized-reflected the complexities of his life, a far cry from the 'happily ever after' of a fairy tale. Beloved by generations of children and adults around the world for tales such as 'The Ugly Duckling' and 'The Emperor's New Clothes,' Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) revolutionized children's literature.

Hans christian andersen quote at sfo terminal