Francine du Plessix Gray





Francine du Plessix Gray

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born
in Warsaw, Poland
January 01, 1930

genre


About this author

Francine du Plessix Gray, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic, was born in Warsaw, Poland, where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat - the commercial attaché. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family (French father and Russian émigré mother) influenced her.

Widowed when her father died in battle, in 1940 du Plessix Gray's mother escaped France to New York with Francine. In 1942, her mother married Alexander Liberman, another White émigré from Russia, whom she had known in Paris as a child. He was a noted artist and later longtime editorial director of Vogue Magazine and then of Condé Nast Publications. The Libermans were socially promi...more


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“I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.”
Francine du Plessix Gray, Lovers and Tyrants

“We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.”
Francine du Plessix Gray

“...in Aristotle...leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work...leisure is pursued solely for its own sake...: the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ...gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium — the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.
We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul...during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships....in loafing, most of our innovations come...the routine of daily work has too often served as...sleep...a refuge from two crucial states — awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes...loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off.”
Francine du Plessix Gray

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