Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Q for love


"If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have."

-- James M. Barrie

1 comment:

GeckoMan said...

James M Barrie was the famous Scottish author of Peter Pan. I was reading about him in Wikipedia, and found this short personal history to be telling of his literary achievement and his quote on love:

"Barrie (1860 - 1937) was born to a family of Scottish weavers in Kirriemuir, Angus, the ninth child of ten. When he was six, his brother David, his mother's favourite, died in a skating accident on the eve of his 14th birthday. His mother never recovered from the loss, and ignored the young Barrie. One time he entered her room, and heard her say "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to," wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'" Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. This had a profound impact on Barrie: he never grew much beyond five foot, and some authors have speculated that Peter Pan was inspired by the traumatic events of his own childhood. At the age of 13, Barrie was sent away to boarding school at Dumfries Academy."